An Angel At My Table
d. Jane Campion (New Zealand, 1990)

Screening in Dundee and Glasgow in 35mm as part of this year’s Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF), An Angel at My Table tells the story of writer Janet Frame, who was institutionalised and nearly given a lobotomy before her first book saved her life.

In these programme notes, commissioned for SMHAF in the film’s 35th anniversary year, writer and artist Rose Ruane makes connections between Frame’s life and work and the work of artist Mary Bishop.

A woman stands before a seascape in vibrant colours, none as bright as her fiercely red hair, her arms are raised in a gesture that implies celebration, liberation even.

A woman stands within a bruise-dark, tempestuous landscape, a pale, emaciated figure, wild hair, haphazardly cropped, her arms are raised in gesture that implies despair, railing against the forces which threaten to overpower her.

These young women are on opposite sides of the globe, living at the same moment, the first Janet Frame, in New Zealand (as depicted in Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table), the second, Mary Bishop, in England, drawn by her own hand.

Each has experienced a childhood shadowed by death within the family, each has found herself outsidered and othered, aching to slip seamlessly into a world of rules and norms they have found themselves unable to conform to, and in early adulthood, have experienced a breakdown and subsequently been labelled with a now long-outmoded diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Each of them has been confined to a mental hospital and, while there, has engaged in acts of creation: ones intricately interwoven with their own attempts to understand and express themselves, and to survive the forces from within and without to which they were subjected.

Jane Campion authentically depicts the mental hospitals in which Janet Frame resides as places of gloom and endless sound, where the anguish of others is ever present and where body and mind are assailed by intrusive attempts both to help and to control.

Within An Angel at My Table’s rich sensory world, which deftly evokes bodily sensation and emotional experience, the palette dims, dragged through with dreary greys and faecal browns. This is in contrast to the verdancy of the countryside of Janet’s home and even the darkness of her childhood residence, which Campion positions as a space as cocooning and comforting as it is grubby and lacking material comfort. Womblike in its overcrowded familiarity, portraying Janet’s large family as supportive and accepting as they are turbulent, stifling and repressed.

In England, Mary Bishop would have recognised Campion’s world of grimly austere interiors and locked doors, the soundscape of other human’s hells inhibiting sleep on wards where beds were packed so tightly, that the strangers whose cries endured all night, laid in the close physical proximity of lovers. She too was subject to the mid-twentieth century mental hospital’s abject lack of agency and bodily autonomy in days lived under a regime of supervised ablutions, regular medical examinations and electro-convulsive therapy, continuous experiences of intrusion and mortification.

Mary expresses this through a self-portrait in which she is stripped of clothing, standing in front of a circus tent, being paraded for leering psychiatrists under the words, ‘See the Nude Woman, Walk Up, Nothing Sacred.’

The work is a j’accuse at the psychiatric system, aimed as starkly as the metal pointer one callous, painted figure jabs in the direction of Mary’s body.

Campion depicts how these medical intrusions inhibit Janet’s creativity: her body outwardly suppurating, her internal torment intensifying, clenching her posture as Janet is deprived of her means of expression. Those that the previous part of the film elegantly situates as the life raft which allows Frame to endure the buffeting forces of societal and social forces within which she struggles to thrive or even voice her supressed desire to do so.

Subsequently, the scene in which Janet’s creativity bursts out of her, first through her voice and then by the act of writing on the wall of her solitary cell is almost ecstatic, quasi-religious: lit like an altarpiece as Janet experiences a release as profound and transcendent as any physical unlocking. This scene foreshadows her literal salvation at the hand of her own creativity as she is spared from a planned leucotomy by her first book’s winning of New Zealand’s biggest literary prize, instantly reframing her as someone whose personhood and artistic expression is worthy of preservation and support to leave the hospital.

Where Janet Frame entered hospital already a writer, aware she intended to be, Mary Bishop only began to paint after admission: her work was produced in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital, which was the first in a UK mental institution, and since she was never asked in her lifetime, we have no idea whether she considered herself an artist. It is likely she did not, there is every chance she perceived the creation of her vast body of work as part of a therapeutic process and a more pleasurable, peaceful way to pass the hours than many others that made up institutionalised lives, ones typified by boredom, inactivity and medicalisation.

Mary’s paintings are part of The Adamson Collection, which is composed of thousands of paintings and sculptures produced by hundreds of people, in the art therapy studio at Netherne.

In researching it, I have spent countless hours with the hospital archive, in which a photograph of people at easels in the studio, queuing to be bathed by orderlies or eating meals in the dining hall may abruptly be followed by an x-ray of a human head at the moment the sharp surgical steel of a leucotome enters the brain, forever altering the human being on whom the procedure was being performed. The same operation that Janet Frame’s writing spared her from undergoing, preserving her creativity.

This overlap in the two women’s lives diverge: the latter part of An Angel at My Table follows Janet Frame as she travels and slowly builds a literary life, still experiencing distress while becoming a celebrated writer. Mary Bishop remains at Netherne Hospital for thirty years, creating hundreds of paintings and drawings, never making art again after she finally leaves for supported accommodation when the hospital closes in the 1980s, her work only now beginning to be recognised.

Jane Campion’s adaptation of Janet Frame’s autobiographical writings, while never dispassionate or distant, allows that mental illness and hospitalisation are only part of how we might understand a life and creative practice. It holds multiple possibilities in balance, not directing the audience to any conclusion as to whether art is created in spite of, or because of the complex qualities of its creator, avoiding a reductive conflation of madness and creation.

Mary Bishop’s work, although produced entirely within a hospital setting, deserves the same freedom from being interpreted only in relation to that fact. She deserves the liberation from institutionalisation that she did not experience in her lifetime to at least be extended to her art.

Rose Ruane
Writer & Artist
October 2025