Project Summary

Cyanotypes developed from historical glass plate negatives of portraits of pauper patients in Victorian asylums, toned with ivy leaves foraged from their burial site. 

Dimensions 76 x 56 cm each.

Description

Apparitions is a series of cyanotype portraits of pauper patients from Victorian mental asylums in Surrey. The original images were captured on glass plate negatives by asylum officials as visual records of the hospitalised patients, from which these cyanotypes were developed.

When the asylums were closed in the 1990s, the medical records, including thousands of glass plate negatives, were abandoned and left to decay in bins and cardboard boxes. Fortunately, they were found and salvaged by an archivist, and are now stored at the Surrey History Centre, Woking.

Drawing on this unique collection, Apparitions focuses specifically on patients who were given pauper burials in the nearby Horton Cemetery. In 1983, the cemetery was sold to a private developer, who removed all the grave markers, then abandoned the site when the local council refused to grant permission for development. It is now a derelict space, overgrown with trees, ivy, and brambles.

Inspired by the thought that the patients’ decomposed bodies have merged with the soil below and the vegetation above, the cyanotypes are toned (dyed) with extracts of ivy leaves foraged from the burial site. Traces of their bodily existence are thus layered onto their images.

The original glass plate negatives were used to produce small 3×2 inch albumen prints for pasting onto medical case notes but, by transforming the scale and materiality into large 30×22 inch toned cyanotypes, these works recontextualise the images and subvert the medical gaze.

The scale of these large works offers the viewer an opportunity to scrutinise the nuanced details of the portraits, to engage with the sitters deeply, personally, and to consider them as individuals with unique lived experiences, rather than anonymous, voiceless patients in mental asylums.

These repurposed images therefore seek to memorialise and reclaim the humanity and dignity of these abandoned and long-forgotten individuals. By revisiting the spectre of psychiatric treatment in the past, Apparitions aims to stimulate conversations around present-day attitudes towards mental illness.

The research and development phase of Apparitions was generously supported by King’s Artists, a residency at King’s College London, in collaboration with Dr Alana Harris, Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural and Gender History (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/artists-in-residence/artists-in-arts-humanities/ericfong).

The stories of some of the patients buried at the Horton Cemetery can be found at: https://hortoncemetery.org/the-people/horton-cemetery-stories/ and https://outofsight.hortoncemetery.org/

Special thanks to Julian Pooley (Public Services and Engagement Manager, Surrey History Centre) for research support, and Guy Paterson (Mesh Print) for technical support.