Art that sheds light on schizophrenia

A three-year artists residency at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, where she met clinicians, research scientists, psychiatrists and their patients, enabled her to explore her ideas further and culminated in Reassembling the Self, a series of exhibitions that she curated across the city, including her own work and that of other artists. A selection of the work opens in London this week.

As an artist, I focus on what it means to be human, she says. In that sense, I work a little like a scientist exploring brain conditions and problems that might clarify who we are. Schizophrenia sheds light on all our experiences it is just at one end of the spectrum of being human.

One series of her lithographs starts with an ear, reflecting the idea of voices, then progresses to reassembled figures with body parts in the wrong places; the work is inspired by the Evelyn Tables, remarkable 17th-century depictions of human anatomy in the Hunterian Museum in London. They were physically dismantled and reassembled body parts, stuck down on boards, built up layer by layer into one finished form, Aldworth explains.

Two other artists in the exhibition, Camille Ormston and Kevin Mitchinson, have schizophrenia. They are both untrained, but art is a vital means of expressing what goes on inside their heads. Aldworth met them once a month for two years, when they told her about delusions, being hospitalised, and how medication numbs them.

Self Portrait by Kevin Mitchinson, 2014 (Courtesy the artist and GV Art Gallery, London)

Camille wanted to be a doctor, but psychotic episodes that started when she was only 16 put an end to that, Aldworth explains. Mitchinson hears voices that tell him what he should paint; although some of these are terrifying, he says he would feel lost without them. Schizophrenia has literally taken them both apart and reassembled them, Aldworth comments.

The project did not end with Aldworths residency. Ormston and Mitchison now regularly attend Newcastle and Gateshead Arts Studio which supports artists with mental health difficulties, and they will join Aldworth in London to see their work on show a reassembly of the best possible kind.

'Reassembling the Self opens tomorrow at GV Art Gallery, 49 Chiltern Street, London W1, until Oct 11; susanaldworth.com

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Art that sheds light on schizophrenia