Outsider artists get a look-in

Skibbereen festival examines the relationship between mental illness and creativity, says Richard Fitzpatrick

THE fourth annual Skibbereen Arts Festival starts today. Mental illness and artistic expression underpin this year’s programme, says Pat Collins, secretary for the festival.

“There’s a strand running through the festival, about what I would call ‘outsider art.’ We’re having an exhibition of work from the KCAT arts studio in Callan, Co Kilkenny. They’re a Camphill Community. There are Camphill Communities all over the world. There are a couple of them in Ireland, which are, basically, for people with special needs who have an opportunity to work as artists. Some of their work is extraordinary.

“Cúig, up in Mayfield, Cork, are also exhibiting; they’re another collection of special-needs people who are artists. We programmed a couple of films because of their participation, as well.”

One film on the bill is All Divided Selves, the third instalment of Luke Fowler’s examination of the work of RD Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist-cum-philosopher-cum-counter-culture-hero from the 1960s and ’70s. Fowler’s installation and photography collection has earned him a place on the shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize.

Laing, who died in 1989, is an interesting character, whose groundbreaking theories on madness and schizophrenia became eclipsed by his celebrity and demise, famously captured in a drunken interview with Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show in 1985. “Are you under stress?” Byrne kept asking him.

Laing turned the world of psychiatry upside down by borrowing ideas from game theory prevalent in the Cold War ideology of the 1950s, believing that couples and family members use strategies to control and manipulate each other, which, in extreme cases, can provoke mental breakdown.

His bleak, paranoid assumptions about the selfish machinations within family life owed much to his upbringing by a mother who was cold and vindictive. On receiving the manuscript for The Divided Self, his first book, which sold a million copies, she tore it up meticulously into little pieces and flushed it down the toilet.

One of Laing’s more interesting experiments was Kingsley Hall in London’s East End, in the 1960s, the meeting of a hippie commune with a psychiatric ward, a precursor (with a twist) of the community-care facilities that have replaced the Victorian asylums that dominated mental-health care in Ireland and the UK.

At Kingsley Hall, Laing held court for hours, high, like many of its patients and guests, on recreational drugs, regaling them with anecdotes and insights. Visitors, including the media, apparently couldn’t tell the patients from those just dropping by (or dropping out), because everyone was uninhibited. “We thought we’d get the Luke Fowler film, because it would be a rare opportunity to see that work in a cinema,” says Collins. “I think film festivals, to a certain extent, are becoming more about hit films, even on the art-house circuit.

“We’re trying to do more films which are about artists, along a borderline between art and filmmaking, as relevant to artists as to filmmakers. Luke Fowler is one of those filmmakers/artists who is important in that regard — half documentary-maker, half-artist. He’s working with archive a lot, and seems to be very interested in psychiatry. He’s very political, as well. A lot of modern art stays away from the political. He’s definitely in that world, where he wants to make a political statement through his work, which seems to be getting more unusual. Artists tend to work on very personal projects that don’t communicate political ideas, as much as they did one time.”

Laing believed mental-health patients were profoundly affected by incarceration, which is made clear in Hidden Gifts, a film also screening in Skibbereen, about the artist Angus MacPhee.

After a schizophrenic breakdown in 1946, MacPhee was spirited from his Gaelic-speaking community on one of the Outer Hebrides islands to a psychiatric hospital in the hills near Inverness. “He may well have become resentful about being taken away from the island,” says an interviewee in Hidden Gifts. “Who wouldn’t? And one way of countering that was a total silence, known as selective mutism; not all that uncommon, but uncommon to go on for 50 years.”

MacPhee wandered the hospital grounds fashioning little sculptures and garments from vegetation and cast-offs like leaves, grass, and sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire, which he hid under bushes. MacPhee’s work would have suited one of the most captivating elements of the festival — the museum of miniature, which houses over 150 pieces of art, “small enough to fit in your hand,” says Collins.

* The Skibbereen Arts Festival, Friday, Jul 27 — Saturday, Aug 4; www.skibbereenartsfestival.com