Figure projected into bath and fluorescent window painting, Scenes from Asylum Wall
Scenes from the Asylum Wall was a performance installation produced as the result of a collaborative residency by Helen Sargeant (Visual Artist), Michael Mayhew (Performance Artist) and Scott Abraham (Film Maker) at the John Moore Hospital, Lancashire prior to its closure in 1997. Exploring the site of the John Moore Hospital in Lancashire, the three artists worked together collecting visual research, and stories drawing upon their experiences of living and working at Brockhall Village the site on another Hospital that was closed and demolished in Lancashire.
The collaboration drew upon their combined memories of place and research methodologies developed whilst living and working at Brockhall Village. Creating a performance installation that utilised and transformed objects, photographs, film, photography, stories and sound recordings to explore the politics and poetics of space. Working through ideas of sedation, madness, isolation, treatments for mental illness, disintegration, the human condition, and the body , they created an intelligent, interdisciplinary artwork which sort to record the historical, cultural and social functions of this Victorian Asylum prior to it being demolished.
The performance installation touched upon the emotional landscape of these institutions and sort to challenge pre-concieved ideas and stigmas attached to such communities.
