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”.
