Fragmentary - Artist Talk

About

In conjunction with Fragmentary - a  new arts website exploring photography and mental health - the evening will take place as part of Creativity and Wellbeing Week and will focus on the theme of mental health which features in all three artists' work. 

Daniel Regan is a photographer and visual artist whose work focuses on themes of mental 
health, the body, recovery and the patient/service user experience. His book project 
Insula documents a decade long struggle living with chronic mental health difficulties, 
utilising diaristic photography as a tool for both recording and recovery. His recent project 
Fragmentary explores the differing experiences of living and observing crises by combining 
self-portraiture with his own medical records. This work was completed as a residency 
at Kentish Town Health Centre with a large-scale installation of medical documents that 
confronted the viewer with the complexities of both being in and observing the chaos mental 
illness can bring. danielregan.com

Liz Atkin is a visual artist for whom physicality underpins a creative practice with her skin as a 
primary source for corporeal artwork and imaginative transformation. Compulsive Skin Picking 
dominated her life for more than 20 years, but through a background in dance and theatre, 
she confronted the condition to harness creative repair and recovery. She creates intimate 
artworks, photographs and performances exploring the body-focused repetitive behaviour 
of skin picking. Liz works directly with her skin as a site for textural transformation, using 
materials such as clay, latex, paint and pastel. She aspires to de-stigmatise mental illness, raise 
awareness and advocate recovery, by sharing her own lived experience. lizatkin.com

Antonia Attwood’s work My Mother Tongue is an exploration of a mothers experience with 
bipolar disorder, as imagined through the eyes of her daughter. By juxtaposing moving image 
on two screens, Attwood aims to illustrate and visually interpret how vthe illness ‘feels’. The 
metaphorical symbols create an attempt to raise awareness and understanding of the mood 
affectations and the phenomenology of mental illness. Antonia is involved with The Institute 
of Inner Vision which endeavours to bring artists, academics, & audiences into the heart of 
interdisciplinary art-science research and artistic practice. antoniaattwood.com