Edward Adamson (1911-1996) was a British artist, a pioneer of using art as therapy, and the creator of the Adamson Collection.
The Adamson Collection is one of the major international collections of art objects made by people who lived in European mental asylums. It holds about 5500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by people at the British long-stay mental hospital, Netherne.
The Collection is important in the histories of British asylums and postwar psychiatry, of art therapy and Jungians and of Outsider Art: encouraged and collected by an artist Edward Adamson, rather than a psychiatrist, and strongly representing the work of women.
The Collection and SLaM
The Collection has been housed at SLaM since 1997: recently the core 2500 paintings and drawings have been moved to Wellcome Library by the Adamson Collection Trust (ACT) to ensure their physical integrity.
As part of the Adamson Festival, 2013, art staff recreated the Netherne studio within the Main Occupational Therapy Unit: the furniture, size of the paper and modes of engagement were based on documentary photos and interviews with Adamson and those who knew him.
Adamson allowed studio participants freedom to pursue their own interests; he also resisted the temptation to over-interpret the work and refused to display individual works on the walls of the studio, not wishing to put the works in competition with each other.
The dynamics of the art studio depend on rules, both spoken and unspoken.
The Adamson Collection is one of the major international collections of art objects made by people who lived in European mental asylums. It holds about 5500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by people at the British long-stay mental hospital, Netherne.
The Collection is important in the histories of British asylums and postwar psychiatry, of art therapy and Jungians and of Outsider Art: encouraged and collected by an artist Edward Adamson, rather than a psychiatrist, and strongly representing the work of women.
The Collection and SLaM
The Collection has been housed at SLaM since 1997: recently the core 2500 paintings and drawings have been moved to Wellcome Library by the Adamson Collection Trust (ACT) to ensure their physical integrity.
As part of the Adamson Festival, 2013, art staff recreated the Netherne studio within the Main Occupational Therapy Unit: the furniture, size of the paper and modes of engagement were based on documentary photos and interviews with Adamson and those who knew him.
Adamson allowed studio participants freedom to pursue their own interests; he also resisted the temptation to over-interpret the work and refused to display individual works on the walls of the studio, not wishing to put the works in competition with each other.
The dynamics of the art studio depend on rules, both spoken and unspoken.