You are now in the final section of Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions. It takes the form of a small room measuring just over 5m by 3m. The focus of this section is the exhibition ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward (“The Snakepit”)’, which Amiss made in 2002.
When explaining this exhibition, Amiss wrote:
“I have referred to ‘The Snakepit’ in the title of the exhibition. That, if you remember, is an old Hollywood film about a woman who gets trapped in a madhouse and can’t get out because no one will believe a word she says.
“With the introduction of the NHS and calling these places by a more moderate name, i.e. mental hospitals, they would, I suppose, have us believe ‘Snakepits’ are a thing of the past. Not so. They are still very much with us.”
The design of this room is reminiscent of the venue Amiss showed her exhibition in, which had two tall, symmetrical windows with dark wood frames, looking out at the British Museum. In the space you are in now, the exhibition architects have adapted these to window seats, which provide a view through to Rudy Loewe’s exhibition next door.
Between you and these windows is a large display case inset into the wall on your right. This houses items of ephemera from Amiss’s archive, including a poster which advertises ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’.
The poster is A4 in size and is made up of three elements: a block of text at the top and bottom, separated by a line drawing of a figure in the centre. This poster was our first clue in trying to piece the exhibition back together, along with a price list that included all the titles of the artworks.
The text at the top of the poster, handwritten in ballpoint pen, spells out in capitals Gallery Forty-Seven, followed by the address in Bloomsbury, London.
The handwritten text at the bottom gives more details of the exhibition, including the dates, which were 22 July to 2 August 2002.
The drawing in the middle captures in a few simple lines the outline of a woman, sitting with her head leant forwards. Her posture suggests exhaustion or despair. A handwritten caption above the image reads “‘Joyce’ down-cast” then the initials “A J A” and the date “2.1.2001”. The name Joyce is in inverted commas.
When we looked at this poster in the archive, hoping to find clues about what Amiss had exhibited in it, the date on this image seemed to suggest that the original drawing may be in one of Amiss’s 2001 sketchbooks.
We looked at her sketchbooks from this period in the Wellcome Collection archive but didn’t find a drawing like this.
The rest of the material in the display case charts the research process by which we searched for this and the other works from ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’. This includes an invoice and magazine that shows how Amiss used professional marketing methods to advertise her exhibitions and raise awareness about psychiatric survivors’ experiences, and a set of sketchbooks which provided important insights about how Amiss made her exhibitions. What we learned through this process will be discussed in the next track.
This is the end of track eight. The tactile path continues to your left to the final stop in the exhibition.