Testimony Artist Errol Francis' Gaze: countergaze - the All Saints and St Ebba's Series

Gaze: countergaze - the All Saints and St Ebba's Series

Two photography projects by Errol Francis

Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley
King's College London
De Crespigny Park
London
SE5 8AF

10 October - 10 December 2008

Preview and collaborative concert
with composer Colin Riley and contemporary music ensemble mooV
10 October 6 - 9pm

Gaze Countergaze explores the opposing viewpoints of psychiatric patients and doctors in an exhibition of two collections of photographs: the All Saints Series and the Saint Ebba's Series.

In the St Ebba's Series, artist Errol Francis has reworked portraits of psychiatric patients taken in around 1900 by unknown photographers whose gaze is fixed upon their subjects as objects of medical curiosity.  St Ebba?s Hospital in Epsom, which opened in 1899 (formerly the Ewell Epileptic Colony) was one of the so-called ?Epsom Cluster? hospitals situated on the outskirts London, and closed in 1995.  The St Ebba?s Series reference the importance of photography in early psychiatry and the now defunct sciences of phrenology and physiognomy.  These disciplines sought to identify mental pathology, and even criminal propensities, from the surface peculiarities of human faces.

In contrast, the All Saints Series features the photographic documentation by patients of a psychiatric hospital as it was in the process of closure.  All Saints Hospital in Winson Green, Birmingham, was a Victorian mental asylum that was opened in 1850 and closed in 2000.  The documentation project was facilitated and curated by the artist in association with patients from the Frantz Fanon Centre where he was director and artist-in-residence from 1997-2002.  The Birmingham Photography Collection acquired the All Saints Series in 2004.  Francis said the photographs made by the patients struck him powerfully because they did not conform to any particular genre and are open to a variety of interpretations. They seem to achieve their impact by operating outside of known categories of representation and are an objective record of an institution ? as well as subjective accounts by psychiatric patients of the environment in which their treatment took place.

The exhibition of both series of prints will be held at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital  from 10 October - 10 December 2008.  The preview night will feature a collaborative concert between Errol Francis, the composer Colin Riley and the contemporary music ensemble mooV.

The artist is grateful for support of this exhibition by the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley and the Birmingham Photography Collection.