‘The Head Carver’: Art Extraordinary and the small spaces of asylum

Abstract

This paper uses the unique collection of Scottish outsider art, labelled Art Extraordinary, as a window into the often neglected small spaces of asylum care in the early twentieth century. By drawing upon materials from the Art Extraordinary collection and its associated archives, this paper demonstrates the importance of incorporating small and everyday spaces of care – such as gardens, paths, studios and boats – into the broader historical narratives of psychiatric care in Scotland. Examples of experiential memorialization and counterpoints to asylum surveillance culture will be illuminated. The significance of using ‘outsider’ art collections as a valuable source in tracing geographical histories will be highlighted.

Historical geography III: Hope persists

“…Work detailing the geographical histories of psychiatry, particularly in Scotland, entails an attempt to bring the most neglected of society to the fore across a range of different scales (Philo and Andrews, 2017). From Farquharson’s (2017) investigations into the unfamiliar institutions of Scotland’s parochial asylums in the 19th century and Gallagher’s (2017) careful tracking of the emergence of mental patient unionism in the early 1970s, through to McGeachan’s (2017) portrait of patient-artist Adam Christie in the early 20th century, a focus on the neglected and the unknown is deliberately given precedence. John Forrester and Laura Cameron (2017) also turn to the psy-disciplines to reveal the neglected or ‘unusual’ geographies and histories of psychoanalysis.…”