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To me, the black is the death of heart, spirit and mind reflected back against the sterile, frigid white of the hospital wall which condemn the patient to only the horror of such death; the heart the target for the struggle to protect oneself in an environment which reaches like a knife to capture and decimate the most inner vulnerability of each patient as they pass through the morgue in which the dirty white hospital walls imprison them, some never to escape.
The picture mirrors frustration for me, the words outside the inner picture speaking of my lonely efforts to understand the deepest truth of the illness which so imprisons me, and the words spoken inside the heart image the fight back of the heart to survive in to me the most fundamentally hostile environment.
The pen denotes self-sabotage and inner conflict, and is reminiscent of the sexual repressions and aggressions which permeate a mixed psychiatric ward. The black blood is the dried blood of Christ which brings the only hope in the picture to its core centre, that of forgiveness; of the self, the ward staff, the other patients, the world as it stands and, ultimately, of God.
(The work is in collage format and I created it while on a women's retreat at an Abbey in Oxfordshire, which I went to in the weeks after my release from a psychiatric ward on the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell, London)."
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