Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions

Audrey Amiss did not leave a will and died before her archive was donated. Her campaigning challenged the lack of agency she and other mental health survivors faced in psychiatric systems. This makes questions of consent and self-representation especially key when presenting her work.

For this exhibition we were guided by material that Amiss had previously exhibited or intended to be seen publicly. This required careful archival research to understand her wishes, while respecting her privacy.

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.

There is still a lot we don’t know about Amiss’s artistic practice. This exhibition is intended as part of the ongoing research into Amiss’s work, sharing what we’ve learned so far, while leaving space for further knowledge that may emerge in the future. 

This exhibition includes archival references to terms historically used in relation to mental health, some of which are outdated or offensive.

This print is believed to be one of the first artworks Amiss exhibited, having been shown in the 1958 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Along with another of her prints, called ‘Interior’, it was listed as a ‘multiple’, meaning numerous copies could have been sold. She had also exhibited and sold a painting there the year before, ‘Portrait of a Girl’.

Amiss showed this work at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters’ 1983 exhibition. On either side are works she submitted to the same society in 1981 and 1987. Together they show how her painting style developed in this period, shifting from a layered and impressionistic still life to a more quickly rendered scene.

Amiss had a longstanding relationship with the New English Art Club, founded in 1886 by artists dissatisfied with the traditional approach of the Royal Academy. She exhibited 24 works with them between 1963 and 1992. She frequently painted her mother in a similar pose, with varying degrees of abstraction.

This press release shows that Amiss exhibited a series of photographs in the People’s Gallery’s 1985 group exhibition, ‘Art Can Damage Your Health (If you don’t appreciate it)’. It notes that she had previously shown work at Covent Garden’s Art Meeting Place in 1974, a gallery known to host exhibitions by activist artist collectives during that period.

These documents relate to what appears to have been Amiss’s first self-organised solo exhibition. She wrote: “The [gallery] owner… has lent some of her furniture… so I could start an art meeting place as I’ve got seats for people to make themselves comfortable.” South London News sent a photographer to cover the exhibition, but the resulting article had no photograph.

‘Fireworks’ seems to have been the first exhibition in which Amiss directly referenced her experiences as a mental health survivor. The contents of this 1989 exhibition are reassembled as far as possible later in this gallery. The subtitle ‘A Protest Exhibition’ reflects her inclusion of painted slogans about psychiatry and harm.

‘Fireworks’ contained several artworks we have not yet been able to trace, but whose dates and titles are close matches to watercolours in this sketchbook. We believe some of those missing works came from this sketchbook, as many of her exhibited works were pages pulled from sketchbooks. This watercolour has a tick on the back, possibly signifying that Amiss selected it to be copied, if not exhibited.

This seems to have been the first of the exhibitions Amiss held at Gallery 47 in central London. She wrote: “I was very pleased with the amount of visitors who came in to see the exhibition… The little gallery was quiet and pleasant whilst, through the window, you could see plenty of activity in the street, for it was opposite the British Museum.”

Amiss often removed pages from her sketchbooks to frame and exhibit, but some of the drawings she used to advertise her exhibitions can still be found intact in her sketchbooks. This raises the question of whether she exhibited the sketchbooks themselves, like this, or sometimes advertised her exhibitions with images that weren’t themselves exhibited.

We used price lists like this to reassemble as many of Amiss’s self-organised exhibitions as possible, cross-referencing titles on the lists with descriptions of her artworks in Wellcome Collection. The works on this list have proved difficult to locate, but some may still be contained in her sketchbooks, like the drawing she used on the poster.

Amiss wrote about this exhibition: “It’s a sample of a series of similar drawings I did 2 or 3 years ago whilst detained in Nelson Ward” (South Western Hospital). She noted that showing recent works “will be a change for me as I usually exhibit older work”. Reflecting later, she wrote, “The exhibition passed off peacefully enough and, by my standards, has been the most successful to date.”

This poster is for Amiss’s 2002 exhibition ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward (“The Snakepit”)’. Currently believed to have been her final exhibition, it is explored in more depth later in this gallery. The poster is painted in the style of her ‘graffiti’ signs, which she exhibited as artworks and also took to protests and demonstrations by mental health survivors.

This is one of a few works by Amiss where the drawings on the front and back are in different orientations. Here, the drawing on the front, titled ‘Dish with Fruit’, is in landscape format, while this work, ‘Vase’ is portrait. Like most works in the series, it depicts a scene from Amiss’s home.

This work shows how Amiss adapted standard frames to display her double-sided works. She removed the backboard and used white tape to emulate a mount, keeping both sides of the sketchbook page visible in the frame. Her signature suggests that this side should be viewed in a landscape orientation, but the work on the other side is portrait.

A graffiti sign bearing this phrase was the first thing visitors encountered in the ‘Fireworks’ exhibition. This projection, based on Amiss’s handwriting, stands in for that now lost work. The slogan echoes the late 20th-century anti-psychiatry movement, which questioned the legitimacy and ethics of mainstream psychiatry. While Amiss uses ‘mad’ as an insult here, and resisted the term herself, she did later affiliate with Mad Pride activism, which reclaimed the term.

This is the only known example of Amiss exhibiting a card as an artwork in one of her solo exhibitions. This was listed as ‘Not For Sale’, but Amiss did sell cards with images of her artworks on them, including drawings she made in psychiatric wards. She donated the money raised to mental health survivor groups.

Amiss was an avid traveller, visiting Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Italy, Nepal and Russia, mostly in the 1970s and 80s. These photographs are from her 1985 trip to Hong Kong. Her visit was cut short when she was arrested and deported back to the UK, where she was detained on a psychiatric ward.

Amiss exhibited this series of photographs in the 1985 group exhibition ‘Art Can Damage Your Health’. She wrote then: “Photography is an offshoot of my painting.” This is reflected in the composition of photographs such as ‘Malaga Scene’, where the focal point is not the people but rather the strong shadow that intersects the image, creating an almost abstract form.

This back issue of an anarchist newsletter was the last item on the work list for ‘Fireworks: A Protest Exhibition’, priced at £3.50. It is not clear what Amiss’s relationship with anarchist movements was, but in 2003, following a march against a new draft Mental Health Bill, she observed that “the Mad Pride logo… incorporates the Anarchist logo”, suggesting she saw a connection between these movements.

The clipping at the top left features a photograph of Amiss holding her graffiti sign ‘Psychiatry. Harming in the Name of Healthcare’ at a Mad Pride demonstration called ‘Stop the Suicides’ in 2003. The photograph is credited to Ted Curtis, co-editor of the influential book ‘Mad Pride: A Celebration of Mad Culture’, on display in the next space.

The term ‘lunatics’ was used in medical and legal contexts until the 20th century. It is now considered offensive and commonly used to stigmatise mental health survivors. Here Amiss is reclaiming the term as a survivor herself. In 2002 she colloquially referred to an event she attended as a “Human Rights for Lunatics March (that’s it in a nutshell)”.

In 2003 British boxer Frank Bruno was sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 and taken to a psychiatric ward by medical staff and police. Reporters gathered outside his home, broadcasting live to the public. It was the first time in UK history that a high-profile public figure was sectioned while the media looked on. We think Amiss made this sign in response.

Mental health survivor movements and offshoots like Mad Pride gained significant momentum in the early 2000s. In 2002 Amiss wrote about a demonstration she attended: “In all my years of psychiatric experience, I have never known anything like this. Meaning mental patients, professionals and interested parties getting themselves organised to fight the excesses and abuses of the shrinks. It just shows how bad things have become.”

This graffiti sign and the poster next to it were the first traces of this exhibition we found in the archive. There was also a price list, with the titles of every work exhibited. However, none matched any of Amiss’s artworks in the Wellcome Collection archive, so the contents of the exhibition appeared to be lost.

The date on this poster image suggested the original drawing would be in one of Amiss’s 2001 sketchbooks in the Wellcome archive, but we didn’t find it in any from these dates. Amiss’s 2002 record books show she sent copies of the poster to many mental health organisations, suggesting that she used this exhibition as part of her campaigning.

We consulted Amiss’s account book to see if she had sold the works from this exhibition, which would explain why they were not in the archive. Instead, we found this invoice, which led us to seek a copy of the 2002 issue of Galleries Magazine, to see if it contained any further clues as to the exhibition’s contents.

As the image in this advert is the same as on the poster, it gave no further insight into the contents of the exhibition. However, Amiss’s choice of publication did convey something about her intentions for the exhibition, reflecting how she used professional marketing methods to amplify the reach of her activist work and share her message with wider cultural audiences.

Audrey Amiss

2000

Photocopy on paper

Wellcome Collection, PP/AMI/H/1/3

This sketchbook contained the poster image for ‘An Exhibition of Recent Works by Audrey Amiss’, along with scenes clearly from inside a ward. The photocopy next to it was inserted in its pages. Amiss later mentioned “the photocopy pictures I’d exhibited (from the locked ward at South Western Hospital)”. This was a crucial realisation: Amiss exhibited photocopies of her ward drawings rather than originals.

Realising that Amiss sometimes exhibited photocopies like this one explained something unusual on the price list for ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’. On it only two works were listed as ‘drawings’, priced at £100 each. The rest were priced as “Small prints – £5, Medium prints – £10, Large prints – £30”. This pricing is consistent with her selling them as photocopies rather than originals.

Three of the artworks on the price list for ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’ were titled ‘Nurse’. Nurses were also a frequent subject in many of Amiss’s other ward sketchbooks. This page, with its five separate drawings, offers a clue to some of Amiss's missing works. Their titles suggest they may also have contained multiple sketches on a single sheet.

Nine of the artwork titles on the price list for ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’ indicate they were views from windows. This was a frequent subject matter for Amiss, both inside and outside of wards, from at least the 1960s onwards. She was detained on wards at this hospital multiple times between the 1989 and 1997, and later exhibited photocopies of some of the sketches she made there.

Searching for ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward’, we consulted Amiss’s scrapbooks from the period, which provide a record of her extensive engagement with mental health survivor movements. Relevant extracts are shared here (focusing on material published in Amiss's lifetime). They led to finding footage of Amiss at a survivor-led demonstration against the use of force in mental health treatment.

In 2003, Amiss described this book as “an insight into how these people live… They’re all ‘mad’ and none of them believe in the psychiatric system.” She notes that she tried to contribute to this “new literary genre” of “mad memoirs” by publishing “the book of (photocopy) drawings called ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward (The Snakepit)’”, but it was not taken forward by the publishers.

This memoir by artist Dolly Sen was one of three books by mental health survivors found on Amiss’s bookshelf, sitting alongside literary classics by authors like Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy and George Orwell. Dolly Sen and Audrey Amiss knew each other in the early 2000s, having met at a Survivors Speak Out event in London.

These two books found on Amiss’s bookshelf were published by Chipmunka Publishing, established in 2002 to publish writing by mental health survivors. In 2003 Amiss wrote a letter to them enclosing a “book of photocopy drawings entitled ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward (The Snakepit)’”, noting “Please return book if work unsuitable”.

The labels here list the contents of ‘Drawings from a Locked Ward (“The Snakepit”)’ exactly as Amiss wrote them on the price list for the exhibition. She listed multiple titles against each number on the list. We understand this to mean that Amiss did multiple drawings per page, but another explanation for this may emerge as the research continues.