A Little Island: this is how art therapist Edward Adamson described his groundbreaking art therapy studio at Netherne Hospital, a Surrey mental hospital, from 1946 onwards.
Rose Ruane has served as chair of the Adamson Collection, steward of thousands of amazing works of art of all kinds created by the patients compelled to live at Netherne. And in A Little Island, she uses a range of structure and form - prose pieces, erasures, ekphrastic poems and more - to describe and enter into the conflicted minds of women in dialogue with themselves.
More days pass. I sit by the window but there is no clock in the hours - winter bundles the hours off in a thick, grey felt and in here, the lights are on all day. I guess the time by the smell of meals; toast, soup, stew. By the changing shifts of nurses whose names I do not know. The trundling of the medicine cart. The wheels squeak like something small which is dying. Or maybe attempting to live.
A Little Island is a remarkable and human artpiece in itself: a unique work of witness and storytelling, vulnerable and enraging and beautiful, as Ruane conjures the real and radical voices of women from a seemingly distant past - and we hear highly contemporary experience reflected back at us.
