Backlog.

But, so what! The sun promised to show its face over the weekend so The Ambassador’s Daughter and I took ourselves off to see Big Sister in Kent. On the way, we took in Whitstable where, contrary to the forecast, it was raining and gloomy.

Even Her Majesty looked a bit grumpy. There was a chap round the corner fighting off flower people..

… and further along, someone not dressed for the weather..

..though looking a bit smug about something. Whitstable was a charming town, full of shops with Victorian and Edwardian shop fronts and very reminiscent of Louth in Lincolnshire, though a bit scruffier.

The following day, Sissinghurst, where years ago I’d managed to get Nigel Nicholson to very reluctantly sign his book, ‘Portrait of a Marriage‘, was on our way back from the Weald Fair (acres of eye-wateringly expensive stuff you can live without). After getting away from the National Trust membership sales drive (ever since they grubbed up Ickworth Vineyard, they’ve not benefitted from my support),

… a brisk walk around the estate ended in the discovery of the perfectly shaped tree.

Back at home, an order for 40 funnels in mild steel sent me off to find my ‘Engineering Formulas and Tables’ published by Lefax of Philadelphia in 1946. It’s an incredibly useful volume and helped me set about the cone development with pencil and paper but,

.. it’s a lot quicker (and more accurate) if the laser-cutting people do it for you. For the bottom collar of the funnel, nobody I knew had slip rollers small enough in diameter so I took the plunge and bought a relatively cheap set from the internet. I had convinced myself that I could roll the cone quite easily in 1.5mm mild steel but was advised to ‘bump’ form it, which would take half the time.

And yes, once I took delivery of the slip rollers I had to take them apart because they’re so blinkin’ rubbish they’ll need a complete rebuild before they can be used.

I have similar plans for this bead roller – there’s a lot of slack in the bushing and end-float in the axles – though I’ll be adding a motor and foot pedal to allow for single-pilot operations. It was a while before I could get on with tweaking the profile of the Alvis Coupé

I was also distracted by a trip to Kettering to collect the wheel and anvils for the completion of the wheeling machine.

It’s always a delight to receive something of such superb quality that you know from the outset that if anything goes wrong, it ain’t the tools! Justin Baker’s ‘self-build’ wheeling machine set is of this ilk. Just as I’d completed the funnel drawings, I had an enquiry for 52, 2 metre long, double-sided, stainless steel pig’s troughs to work up as well; I don’t know how I’ve managed to get into the pig unit business but, as the magnetising is sort of seasonal, it should help tide me over the winter.

A few weeks at home will sort out the logjam.

It Came To Mind.

‘Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed’.

Because I was standing in front of Odd Nerdrum’s, ‘The Murder of Andreas Baader’, at the moment when Banksy’s pearl of wisdom popped into my head, I couldn’t at first get round the second clause. My initial thought was, ‘why would anyone encourage this sort of thing?’ – the act that is, not the art.

Even a cursory glance at Banksy’s work will confirm that’s not what he meant. Banksy has consistently used his art to get the attention of those he feels are responsible for the injustices of the world; that’s the ‘disturb the comfortable’ bit. ‘Comfort the disturbed’; art as a therapy is the more likely explanation and that was when things took a surprising turn.

‘ Kite’. Courtesy of the Adamson Collection / Wellcome Library

We’ve most of us heard of the therapeutic value of art in the treatment of the difficult and the disturbed but, like me, I would guess that for many of us, that’s as far as our awareness goes. Imagine then, coming across a body of work that wasn’t created, promoted, bought, sold and exhibited by a select few, though was otherwise indistinguishable except in one crucial respect; the narratives of the works seemed perfectly lucid.

‘The Demonstration’. Courtesy of the Adamson Collection / Wellcome Library

Was this intelligibility inherent in the works a consequence of their creators focusing completely on the task of communicating through their art because the need to communicate was paramount? If I was even partially correct in saying that ‘art is our way of informing ourselves of our view of the world’, then in that task, this body of work was entirely successful. I know that the authors of the pieces I was looking at were mostly compelled to be incarcerated for their failings, so already there was a context, an understanding – I could make a reasonable assumption about what was going on based on my own capacity for conjuring up disturbing thoughts – we’re all of us perfectly equipped (in sound mind or not) to create all kinds of mayhem and we can certainly recognise it in others too.

‘Drowning’. Courtesy of the Adamson Collection / Wellcome Library

Why then do the narratives of the exhibits that I grumble about, those created by the – so to speak – undisturbed, who are at liberty to explore, experiment with, journey to and investigate the relationships between anything and everything – in the telling, so disastrously lose me? Context is my guess. Typically, ‘various expressions of dissension and countercultural forces that result in ambiguous thematisations of the dilemmas of transgression’, does not provide context. Instead, it fabricates, abdicates and obfuscates, and in so doing relinquishes any claim to the piece being art, confirms the creator’s status as clown and the gallery’s role as the Big Top.

I was interested to continue my researches and they led me firstly to Adrian Hill, then Edward Adamson. Hill instigated the employment of art as a therapeutic tool when he was in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis in the early 1940’s. Adamson, an artist, later working with Hill, then took the ideas to the Netherne Hospital, an asylum for the long-term mentally ill in Surrey – one of several such institutions in Britain. I won’t go any further because the Adamson Collection Trust tells it better than me.

The brief history of art therapy is compelling, inspiring and happily, comforting.

http://www.adamsoncollectiontrust.org

http://www.adamsoncollectiontrust.org/resources/