Description
Lunatic 430 is constructed from fragments of institutional history, handwriting & contemporary calligraphy.
The artwork incorporates imagery derived from a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum in Dover Street, Liverpool, including elements of its historic map & overlapping handwritten text taken from the asylum patient book.
Among those records is the story of a patient whose notes document the consumption of laudanum — the opium-based preparation widely used during the nineteenth century. Fragments of that recorded history have been enlarged, displaced & layered across the garment, becoming almost abstract when removed from the page.
The archival material is combined with modern calligraphy & additional handwritten marks, allowing different periods & different voices to occupy the same surface. Plans become decoration; medical records become pattern; handwriting becomes image.
Printed across the body & sleeves in stark black & white, no single part of the original document remains the centre of the composition. The sweatshirt becomes a moving collage of place, language & recorded memory.
