You are now in the introduction area of ‘Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions’.
Audrey Amiss was a prolific artist, working across painting, watercolour, drawing, pastel and photography, and filling an estimated 50,000 sketchbook pages.
She trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in the 1950s, and whilst she experimented with various styles over her career, she always worked ‘from life’, writing in 1998 that she “stuck to their methods of training, for there is endless inspiration in realism or painting the world around you”.
Ahead of you is the introduction text and to the right an artwork called ‘Orchestra’, one of two works by Audrey Amiss that were exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1958, a prestigious annual open-submission show selected by a panel of judges.
‘Orchestra’ is a framed print in landscape format. The printed image itself is 9 centimetres high by 13 centimetres wide, and it’s surrounded by a large mount in a frame that’s 38cm high by 46 cm wide. The print shows a view from among an orchestra of about 25 musicians, dressed in black tuxedos. Their heads are depicted as plum-coloured oval shapes, most of them topped with black hair. They sit at music stands, arranged in a semicircle facing a conductor. He stands on a raised platform, but the lower part of his body is hidden by the music stands. The space behind him is depicted as a swathe of black flecked with blue. The floor is a sandy colour, as are the chairs on which the players are sitting. Some of the chairs are only implied by the sitting position of the players’ bodies. Most of the chairs and music stands in the lower left corner are unoccupied, and towards the right, violinists cluster – their bows bristling, pointing into the air. The conductor looks towards the players, his baton in one hand pointing down. His other hand is outstretched as if he’s quietening the players. It’s a small but powerful image, evoking the hushed moment of rapt attention before the music begins.
To the left of this print is the exhibition’s introduction text. It explains that alongside her artistic work, Amiss campaigned for reform to the mental health system, attending demonstrations and writing to policymakers. Identifying as a mental health survivor, she drew on her own experiences, having left the Royal Academy after what she described as her first mental breakdown. She was detained in psychiatric units at least 11 times between the 1950s and 2000s.
After her death in 2013, Amiss’s archive was donated to Wellcome Collection by her family. In developing this exhibition, our aim was to understand what Amiss herself wanted to be seen publicly, and the perspectives on the mental health system that she wanted to be heard.
This required careful archival research to understand her wishes, balanced with a need to respect her privacy.
Much of Amiss’s campaigning challenged the lack of agency she and other mental health survivors faced in psychiatric systems, which makes questions of consent and self-representation especially key when presenting her work.
Decisions about what to consult and exhibit were made case by case, working with people who knew Amiss, those connected to survivor movements, and a team of lived-experience advisors, including people with experience of psychiatric detention.
This archival research revealed that dozens of Amiss’s artworks were included in group exhibitions, and she organised at least six solo shows, some of which drew attention to survivors’ experiences in psychiatric systems. These exhibitions became our guide for what to include in ‘The Surviving Exhibitions’, which attempts to reassemble as many of these as possible, amplifying the message of a talented artist dedicated to advocating for justice.
The walls in this space are painted in a rich green-blue colour, similar to the kind of paint colours used in the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1950s, where Amiss first exhibited this work.
From here on, the exhibition unfolds as a series of interconnected rooms, each designed to reflect the space in which the works that are on display here were originally shown in by Amiss herself.
Please be aware, this exhibition includes terms historically used in relation to mental health, some of which are outdated or offensive.
You can find a glossary in the Gallery Guide for further information.
This is the end of track one. Please follow the tactile path to your right to find the next stop on the digital guide.