how are difficult pasts remembered?
voyeuristic driftwood is an ecocreative online exhibition navigating the intersections of mental health and distress, environment, culture and community. This is a Mad studies exhibition that examines pop-culture representations of former mental health hospitals (asylums). It challenges historical portrayals of former psychiatric hospitals while engaging with contemporary understandings of mental healthcare and representation. The exhibition features mixed media works in oil paint, watercolour, charcoal, permanent ink, pencil and textiles.
Activity: please write a few descriptive words about this artwork before reading the next paragraph.
The artwork represents the old Ballarat Asylum building (circa 1866) that still stands today. It is somewhat altered in roofline and usage, blending into suburban surroundings—its various pasts unacknowledged.
What did you see in the artwork? What words did you choose to describe it? Creepy tendrils? A haunting atmosphere? Ghostly seeds of decay? Eerie paranormal scenes of torture and pain? Or pop-culture stereotypes of asylum life?
Does this image reinforce or dismantle sanism1 (or is that your job as the reader/interpreter)? Perhaps you see a metaphorical mind museum2 in this image? This activity is a play on the idea of “voyeuristic drift”3 by author Francesca Lanz in Mind Museums: Former Asylums and the Heritage of Mental Health. The whole exhibition questions stigma and control, capitalist notions of productivity and value, and the existence of dark tourism and macabre voyeurism.
Stimming Trees
~zoom in for textured threads~
~zoom in for textured threads~
~zoom in for textured threads~
Old-growth trees stand in witness
to earthen stories—inspirited,
proximal communities and tales told
over fungal networks, soil deposits—
timeless observers to all things above
embedded and below.
Sentinels of memory, now protected
from short-sighted whims
of human lifespans. They stim
for themselves, spoons spent in sway
dancing in the breeze;
a homebase for wattlebirds,
rosellas & magpies, ants,
bees & human bodyminds
seeking safety in motion,
stasis and stability.
Masking Tree
Thirst inducing spread
conformity, costume change
crickets and dry earth.
Stimming Tree
Soothe — uplook teaching
singing meshworks lifeforce flow
boom, mind mushrooms.
***
[1] Perlin, Michael L. ‘Sanism and the Law’. AMA Journal of Ethics, vol. 15, no. 10, Oct. 2013, pp. 878–85. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2013.15.10.msoc1-1310.
[2] A mind museum is “a site-specific and place-based cultural institution whose work taps into the material and immaterial heritage it conserves and exhibits, with the ultimate goal of promoting awareness and dismantling the stigma and stereotypes surrounding mental health today” (Francesca Lanz. Mind Museums: Former Asylums and the Heritage of Mental Health (Routledge, 2024), 4.
[3] Francesca Lanz. Mind Museums: Former Asylums and the Heritage of Mental Health (Routledge, 2024), 53.
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