PERSONAL EFFECTS: a history of possession
Personal Effects: a History of Possession, is a work, now in process, that has grown out of an engagement with the personal effects of past patients from The Richmond Asylum – later known as St Brendans Hospital, – in Grangegorman, not far from the heart of Ireland’s capital city, Dublin. Given the provenance of these personal possessions the title should also be read to include the meaning of the effects of institutional care upon the person.
The trove of personal possessions, or effects, was discovered during the retrieval of the institution’s bound archival records from the attic of a disused hospital building. That discovery coincided with the making of a film documentary, Behind the Walls, by the late Mary Raftery, which explored the history of Ireland’s mental hospitals in the 20th century. It was by means of this documentary, first broadcast in 2011, that I learned of the existence of these personal possessions and, deeply moved by their discovery, why I set out to successfully locate them.
For the past twenty months I have, alongside members of the Grangegorman Community Museum and under the guidance of the National Archives, sorted through the mountains of loose paper records that were also retrieved in the hospital’s attics. In the process I have made a selection of memorabilia, correspondence and documents with which I have received permission to develop a response both as an artist and as a citizen.
Some of these possessions are being used to create a work of art that has at its core the histories of anonymous persons who lived, and were cared for, within the institution of the hospital. Given their context these possessions are charged objects yet with little of the strange to be found among them. They are of the everyday, suggestive of inner lives no less rich nor remarkable than our own and revelatory of stories as much about ourselves as about their owners.
These possessions offer a remarkable trove of material for social research and artistic engagement and provide a rare opportunity for honest and truthful exploration of the complex nature of human being. The art installation, Personal Effects: a History of Possession, is created in response not only to the possessions discovered within the hospital complex but also to their possessors who were in turn possessed by the institution for the duration of their care. The work also responds to the official archival records of the Richmond Asylum, (St Brendan’s Hospital) and to the history of institutional care for the mentally ill in Ireland as a whole. It is a goal of the work to allow an imagination of life – both within and without the institutions – as “others” might have experienced it. It is in our ability to imagine lives other than our own that our compassion, or lack of it, is rooted. A great cultural richness is to be found within this material that might tell us much about ourselves and about our society.
The Installation of ‘Personal Effects: a History of Possession’. The installation is comprised of the personal effects of past patients ( all rendered anonymous) and is scheduled for site-specific exhibition in one of the old asylum buildings from 1-10 May 2014. In the context of bringing back to life some of the personal histories discovered within the old asylum this is a most appropriate location
From the ceiling of one darkened room will hang a number of upended handbags and suitcases. The contents of each container will be suspended as though falling to the floor. A light source from within each upended container will illuminate its suspended contents below. A looped soundtrack will play the recorded voices of actors reading from correspondence found within the containers, from case notes and from hospital management records.
Schedule. This first site-specific installation of the work occured during Phizzfest 2014 two hundred years and two months after the first patient was admitted to the Richmond Lunatic Asylum in Grangegorman. While based on the personal possessions of past patients of the asylum (and the mental hospital it later became), this installation, Personal Effects: a History of Possession, provided an effective and challenging experience in other spaces after its initial exhibition in the hospital building. It was then installed in Culture Box, Temple Bar, the heart of Dublin’s cultural quarter, during the month of June 2014.
Each exhibition serves as a catalyst for the development of creative synergies with community groups around the country especially in towns where asylums were located and where lives have been touched by similar histories. Such synergies are presently being developed with Axis Arts Centre and Community Resource Centre in Ballymun, Dublin.
