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The Flood and the Fire

Keira McLean & Joey Simons

Keira McLean and Joey Simons are both artists and community educators from Glasgow. They have created a mixed-media montage drawn from histories of revolutionary struggles around mental health and state institutions. This is accompanied by a pedagogical workbook containing a series of DIY writing and printmaking activities.

This year marks the centenary of the death of John MacLean, the Clydeside revolutionary whose legacy has played an important part in our political thinking since a young age. His fight against the brutal conditions he faced in jail, their effect on his mental and physical health, is the starting point for our work.

We can’t think about mental health outside of the exploitative relations which still dominate our lives, and we want the montage and workbook to open up unexpected connections between histories of revolutionary struggle and people’s own experiences today. We hope these histories can help us to imagine the transformation of a still sick society.

Keira McLean and Joey Simons

The Flood and the Fire

The Workbook

There is no right or wrong way to use this workbook.

It can be printed, copied or ignored.

The following exercises can be adapted, plagiarised, remade, discarded or completed. They can be done alone, in groups, on paper or in your head.

We fully encourage you to write in and on every page.

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not

(From ‘Recreation’ by Audre Lorde)