Fragmentary - Artists in Conversation

Join us for an evening of debate with three artists who explore mental health in their own highly personal work.

Free Space Gallery is pleased to host this in collaboration with Fragmentary - a new arts website exploring photography and mental health - the event is part of Creativity ad Well-Being Week.

Daniel Regan is a photographer and visual artist whose work focuses on themes of mental health, the body, recovery and the patient/service user experience. His book project Insula documents a decade long struggle living with chronic mental health difficulties utilising diaristic photography as a tool for both recording and recovery. His recent project Fragmentary explors the differing experiences of living and observing crises by combining self portraiture with his own medical records. This work was completed as a residency
at Kentish Town Health Centre with a large-scale installation of medical documents that confronted the viewer with the complexities of both being in and observing the chaos mental illness can bring.

Liz Atkin is a visual artist for whom physicality underpins a creative practice with her skin as a primary source for corporeal artwork and imaginative transformation. Compulsive Skin Picking dominated her life for more than 20 years, but through a background in dance and theatre, she confronted the condition to harness creative repair and recovery. She creates intimate artworks, photographs and performances exploring the body-focused repetitive behaviour
of skin picking. Liz works directly with her skin as a site for textural transformation, using materials such as clay, latex, paint and pastel. She aspires to de-stigmatise mental illness, raise awareness and advocate recovery, by sharing her own lived experience.

Antonia Attwood’s work My Mother Tongue is an exploration of a mothers experience with bipolar disorder, as imagined through the eyes of her daughter. By juxtaposing moving image on two screens, Attwood aims to illustrate and visually interpret how the illness ‘feels’. The metaphorical symbols create an attempt to raise awareness and understanding of the mood affectations and the phenomenology of mental illness. Antonia is involved with The Institute of Inner Vision which endeavors to bring artists, academics, & audiences into the heart of interdisciplinary art-science research and artistic practice.