Artform: Visual Arts

I’m not the first person to consider – rather than consumers in the mental health system, what if patients are also workers? How might that inform the shape of our resistance.

We don’t want a seat at your table. We have our own tables. We gather around kitchen tables, supermarket cafe tables, ward dining room tables. Give us the money.

When I was discharged from hospital I was told I couldn’t come back to the ward as a visitor for 6 months. What of the friends and comrades who remained?

In thinking about some Mad future I thought about the ways groups form and acquire names and identities.

We don’t want a seat at your table. We have our own tables. We gather around kitchen tables, supermarket cafe tables, ward dining room tables. Give us the money.

This is a quote from Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. It has been important to me to think about the things we do to resist, to ‘shove at the thing’.

No, and Not, thread through this archive of posters, an inadvertent rhetoric. There’s something about refusal and rejection, about negativity.

This poster connects directly to the on-going #StopOxevision campaign, resisting the roll-out of surveillance cameras into bedrooms on psychiatric wards.

Lilith (Lea) Cooper is an artist, zine librarian and researcher based in Kirkcaldy, Fife. They have created an archive of future propaganda exploring what a mad revolution would look like.

Come along to this creative drop-in session, one of several taking place across Lanarkshire, and contribute to an art installation exploring issues related to mental health.