Pencil Sketches

During the 1980’s and early 1990’s I worked in a variety of rehabilitation units and institutions. At Pine-Tree Place, a unit attached to Rochford Hospital in Essex, I ran art groups for people with learning/ physical disabilities. Art was used, in the main, as a vehicle of expression for people with limited verbal skills with a strong emphasis on free expression, making choices and building confidence and self-esteem.

At a hospital in East London, the majority of people I worked with had lived there for most of their lives and were institutionalised. The hospital, built in the 1800’s, was a Victorian, long-stay institution originally built as an orphanage and women’s workhouse.

The experience of working with people whose lives had been spent largely confined behind walls was a profoundly disturbing one. Even more disturbing was my discovery of a ward containing only elderly women. Some of these women, although institutionalised, were capable and intelligent. I gradually came to learn about the various reasons for their incarceration decades ago- epilepsy, physical disability, slight learning difficulties, giving birth to an illegitimate child, physical abuse from a husband and /or abandonment. Common terms and labels I saw on old hospital admission documents were ‘ineducable’, ‘imbecile’, ‘moral defective’, and ‘cretin’.

During my time at the hospital in East London, teaching in the Social Education Centre, I completed a series of pencil portrait sketches of most of the resident population, many of whom I worked with and knew well. The series consists of about four hundred portraits and is a record of the final generation of people who lived in this particular institution before it closed in the mid 1990’s.
The portraits depict the residents engaging in their everyday routines for example, eating, drinking, smoking, sitting, snoozing, waiting, drawing, listening to music, dancing and arguing.