Drawing by Jacinda Ardern Sold for $12,000 at Charity Auction

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (Reuters Photo)
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (Reuters Photo)
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Drawing by Jacinda Ardern Sold for $12,000 at Charity Auction

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (Reuters Photo)
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (Reuters Photo)

An original artwork by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has sold for NZD $18,050 (USD 12,000) during an open charity auction.

According to the German News Agency, the artwork called "The Political Cycle" was displayed on the Trade Me website on Saturday.

The drawing, which features a tornado and has no other copy, witnessed over 200 bids and more than 33,000 views.

Proceeds from the auction will be donated to Koru Care NZ, a charity that supports kids facing life-threatening illnesses or disabilities. Koru Care spokesperson Tracey Curran said the charity had to cancel its major annual fundraiser due to COVID-19.

"Although our overseas trips are currently on hold, we will be continuing making dreams come true by planning domestic holidays for these special kids," she added.

It is not the first time Adern's artwork has been auctioned off on the website, with a piece called "To Do List" raising 2,500 New Zealand dollars (USD 1,670) for the charity Parent to Parent in 2018.



Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.