The Highcroft Lifebook Project & African Masks

Geat Gran Emma And Me In Elder Field Circa 1961

2007-02-26T16:21:00.000-08:00

It was maybe in 1961 - perhaps the summer when this photo was taken of Great Gran Emma Arnold putting her arm around me in Elder field north nearby the London and Birmingham railway line in Sheldon .

Its a moment that haunted my life . I had by that time been adopted , "In family" by Great Gran Emm'a son who was my own mother's half great uncle .

Unfortunately I was child abused and mistreated . My real mom went on to have two more children both born by the time this photo had been taken . It tortured me and I lived more as a "rejectee" in a kind of kind of unseen long term exile .. I knew all about "my sisters" for they were still called that , despite the paradox of me not being with them in my proper family place . And Pammy my "full" sister was not with me either . If we saw each other at some family occasions - we knew who we were - we had been in a home together in 1956 - put there by our mother . Pammy and I had bonded .

This one moment of being in this area with Great Gran magnetised me unconciously so that I would go back to this spot nearby the railway in Sheldon in my childhood - it was like a compulsion . I kept going there after she died in 1968 and the world for me was changing slowly towards my own breakdown..And when the world built its factories and firms by this area I still passed it like a forgotten prayer and faith that maybe someway I would be finally seen ..

Great Gran had been in the Erdington Workhouse in 1907 and 1913 a few times - she had lost children and her daugher Florence (my real mother's mother) had been displaced for years with an aunt in 1913 - 1918 and I was to be heading toward the same place as the Highcroft Mental Hospital by 1973 suffering from terrible feelings of an unrecognised void of self .. I had not been recognised for the pain I had been in . No-one "saw" or spoke in my Birmingham family , it was the way - iron in the tongue was all . No feelings were ever discussed . Its no wonder - they were too painful in the history of painful childhoods we had all had ..

"Forget the Past" was always our defensive family code ..The damaged past inside us though - never forgot some of us ........

The Soul Mask Of Us In Blue And Orange (In Memory Of The 18)

2006-11-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

For what can you do
With some hundred years of pain
When you have been the suffering child
In the history of the family
Of them
Again again and again ?

What can you do ?

To remain yourself
And sane ?

You make art from the dream
You combine them
Into your flag of self
That you paint and you
Stitch with the power of scream

This is the way
To sew by soul
And the story of us together
Is made to the prayer of
A recognised whole ..

"Cor Veritatis" The Heart Of Truth Highcroft Mask

2006-11-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

I probably finished this sculpture this 2003 . Set in the forehead is the tower of Highcroft Hospital . The great tower that can still be seen for miles around . I know my kin from 1896 onwards will have seen this tower as a constant . I know they will have suffered as I did in that place . As a Workhouse it had housed broken family life - as a mental hospital it did the same ..

Our story connects the two and sees real connection of pain and associtated emotional imprints of it in children and adults not being dealt with but covered up so it repeated itself in undiscussed patterns across family life and four gernerations ..

Oh yes ...its more than possible ...Its tragically real for us the tribe of 18 ..

So tribal marks of the "18" were put on the face and a jagged tear for anguish . The moon for our aloneness is set by the tower and the star is for what integrity we had left ..And life will certainly injure that possibility. The eyes show the broken up quality of us and the cut circles within arew important as symbols into a circularised "Vision" into inter-generational suffering . When you do a work like this you know you are touching the sacred and making it a place of received grace and grief ...

The sculpture is made from a Copper Beech branch from the grounds of the hospital . Two others were made from the same branch .. I heaved it up from the nearby demolished area of Ward Faith 3 where I had been as a teenager .. "Cor Veritatis" : "The Heart Of Truth" ...

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Highcroft Hospital 2002

2006-11-15T03:38:00.000-08:00

Snows on the roof
On the ribs of history
And from the wood
Of your beams
I remade our memory.

It was a sad thing to watch the old Highcroft Mental Hospital go into disrepair and then finally become developed for mainly middle class housing ..

As I watched in these years of its change I knew the Hospital itself had never been the problem for some of us , the grounds had been truly asylum like , but the main problem was a lack of deep human understanding and empathic therapeutic treatment into the human story that had seen a lot of us end up in this place . Passing the ex-workhouse hulk frequently in these years from 2001 - 2005 I saw ghosts and memories everywhere .. Young people who had been in Ward Faith 3 with me in the 1970's - a number of them dead through suicide or early death ...Joanne , Alec , John and others .....Gone.

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The Sixth Highcroft Mask

2006-11-15T03:24:00.000-08:00

I recall in 2003 cycling past the Highcroft hospital cricket ground on the way to Occupational therapy to do some sculpture and a tree had been cut down near to the cricket ground .

I went to see the O.T. Woodwork Instructor and asked if I could have some help in getting one or two of the branches back to the woodwork section

A couple of the other patients helped me to use a trolley to get some of the wood ..

I never found out what the wood was .. It was very wet and yet as it dried the resin bonded it into a very hard wood indeed ...It cut well though, like the Copper Beech I had also found in the grounds from a tree which had made 3 "masks" previously ...

I never gave this one eyes and perhaps it sleeps in a witness sleep for all of us who were in the Highcroft Hospital ..

A Picture Of The Soul Mask

2006-10-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

At least three renderings of the same image were created to try to extract various senses of energy and experiences that inspired the creation of the masks themselves.

These images were not so much conceived as allowed to become themselves in a process that touches the deeper regions of feelings.

The process of feeling itself forms the colours and the marks by instinct. The creative technique lies in form of abeyance half abandoned partly watching. All of the wooden masks were made like this too.

They had to "become themselves" out of the unconscious reservoirs of feelings. In creating the masks I felt I was creating faces of the spirit of all of us who had been in the Highcroft Hospital or the Workhouse that it had once been before 1948 and the begining of the N.H.S.

The Picture Of Jackie Simela (Died 2002 Soweto)

2006-10-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

It was poignant talking about loss sitting in the converted "Custard Factory" in Birmingham UK 2003 trying to find a way to collaborate in the mental health arts and just looking down at a small picture handed me of a South African man who had been a community worker and had been shot by car thieves in Soweto when he went to investigate a noise outside of his house .....

I was later to be so moved by him I did the picture and made him a spirit chief of sorts . Photo's of the picture went to his wife in South Africa too . That means everything to me ..

Life is often cheap and quickly over for some...Or life is shockingly painful and full of separation which comes in different forms. In fact loss , catastrophic loss , of family for me and even the sense of what happened was something that made me make the Highcroft Masks out of the wood of the mental hospital itself ...

I'd been in the Highcroft mental hospital in 1973 a broken teenager. Arriving there as a sudden admission . I'd lost my sense of being able to navigate what was real , what was "reality" .

Looking back I am not surprised I grew up having to split myself off from many feelings and even a language for my own sadness .. When I did the painting of Jackie in 2003 I'd probably made one sculpture in the Highcroft Mental Hospital Occupational Therapy Woodwork department. I never did art in paintings there though . The hospital never gave me that service . The first sculpture in O.T. for me was me taking control of my creativity. The creativity I need for my health . It was kind a try-out though from local timberyard wood. It was modelled on Akenaten , but deeper than that for me , it echoed "lost lands and lost times" . It was a figurative way of talking to myself . Of finding a way to live with permanent pools of grief and damage . The masks were to come next....