Out of the Shadow

By Susan Mansfield, 13.10.2023

Madonna 1998, courtesy Falkland Estate

There are many pathways to becoming an artist, but few are as singular as the road taken by Mary Barnes. With no art experience or training, the former nurse began to express herself in paint while wrestling with severe mental illness, emerging from the process not only recovered but with a new identity as an artist.

Barnes, who lived for the last 16 years of her life in Scotland, is the subject of an exhibition at the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre, Glasgow University, as part of this year’s Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF). Organisers hope Rebirth and Revolution: The Life and Legacy of Mary Barnes will help bring her remarkable work to a wider audience.

 

Barnes is chiefly known in therapeutic circles as a famous patient of the maverick Scots psychiatrist R D Laing. Curator of the Glasgow exhibition, Victoria Tischler, who is Professor of Behavioural Sciences at Surrey University, believes she deserves to be recognised as an artist in her own right.

 

“She has been recognised in the outsider art scene, but that is now a bit of a problematic term. Some people call her work primitive, naïve, folk art. To me, her painting looks expressionist, with strong colours and heavy, textured application of paint.

 

“I think she wanted to be recognised as an artist. That reinvention of herself was very important to her. I want to shine a light on her as a forgotten woman artist. Her output is powerful and interesting, relevant in terms of artistic quality and also therapeutically.”

 

Tischler believes the show comes along at a key moment when women artists are being rediscovered and given a place in the canon. At last year’s Venice Biennale, curator Cecilia Alemani used the world’s biggest art festival to platform the work of women artists, including many regarded as “outsider artists” who often made their work in therapeutic contexts. Tischler says there is increasing interest in Barnes’ work from collectors and contemporary artists.

 

Mary Barnes was born in 1923 in Portsmouth and trained as a nurse, working as a nursing sister in the army in Egypt and Palestine in 1945-6. In 1965, struggling with her mental health, she wrote to R D Laing after reading his bestselling book ‘The Divided Self’. She was treated for five years at Kingsley Hall, Laing’s residential psychotherapeutic centre set up as an alternative to a psychiatric hospital. American psychoanalyst Joseph Berke, who had travelled to the UK to work with Laing, was her physician.

 

Kingsley Hall combined ground-breaking - and controversial - approaches to psychiatry with a liberal dose of Sixties counter-culture: doctors and patients lived together and took recreational rather than prescription drugs. Mental illness was reframed as a spiritual awakening, and those experiencing psychosis were supported to work through their illness to reach a kind of enlightenment or rebirth. “Breakdown to breakthrough” was a common Laing mantra.

 

Berke guided Barnes through radical regression therapy in which she became like a small child who had to be bottle-fed and bathed. When she began to “paint” on the walls of her room with her own excrement, he encouraged her creativity and gave her paints. Gradually, her frenzied scribbles developed into an artistic language drawing on ideas of rebirth and recovery, the healing power of nature, and the rich imagery of her Roman Catholic faith. Together Berke and Barnes wrote a book about her illness and recovery, ‘Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness’ (1971).

 

Tischler says: “Mary talked about how the work came ‘screaming out of her’. For her it was deeply cathartic to represent her psychosis, her anger and trauma. She made a really powerful series of paintings about ‘IT’ - her psychosis. They use a lot of dense black and red, it’s an amazing manifestation of anger on the page. She talked really passionately about how important art was to her mental health.

 

“Some of things that happened at Kingsley Hall would be unconscionable today, but the truth is Mary did recover and flourish. She became a passionate advocate for the use of creativity to help people’s mental wellbeing.”

 

Barnes’ art was exhibited for the first time at Camden Arts Centre in 1969, when she was still at Kingsley Hall, and she would continue to show her work worldwide for the rest of her life, often accompanying exhibitions with talks on mental health and creativity. In 1985, she moved to Scotland, with the hope of founding a therapeutic centre here, living first in Falkland, Fife, then in the village of Tomintoul in the Cairngorms. She continued to paint and exhibit, and her book ‘Something Sacred’, a book of conversations, writings and paintings, was published in 1989. She died in 2001.

 

Tischler says: “She said she didn’t really care about people’s analysis of her work. She wanted to be appreciated as an artist and for people to see her art. Through a feminist lens, Mary Barnes is known because of her relationship to two very powerful men, R D Laing and Joseph Berke. A lot has been said about Laing and his legacy, but Mary wasn’t appreciated as much in her lifetime, she was in their shadow.

 

“Laing has had plenty of airtime. At this exhibition in Glasgow, his hometown, I mention him only in passing. This show is about Mary and her life and her work, to invite more people to become aware of her importance, and her interesting and accomplished art.”

 

Rebirth & Revolution: The Life and Legacy of Mary Barnes is at the Mazumdar-Shaw Research Centre, Glasgow University, until 21^st October.