The Lunatics’ Common Room is an artistic engagement with those deprived of their personal autonomy in mental asylums over the past three centuries. The imagery of this series draws upon the life, writings, and art of historic individuals, including John Thomas Perceval, Antonin Artaud, Unica Zürn, Bessie Head, Osamu Dazai and Valérie Valère. As part of the process, I spend time reading and looking closely at the work of these historical figures, pulling out words, phrases, and images that resonate with me, using them as points of inspiration for the photographs. Alongside this, I translate mine and my uncle's own experiences of hospitalisation into images as well. In bringing fragments of the past into dialogue with the present, and the historical into dialogue with the personal, I seek to create a body of work through which suppressed ontologies of madness can be shared - I envision The Lunatics' Common Room as a space outside institutional boundaries, an imagined ‘room of our own’.
