‘Portraits: Patients and Psychiatrists’ (2009-2010, Wellcome Trust Arts Award)
Described as ‘unique in Art History as the first series of portraits to mix psychiatrists and psychiatric patients indiscriminately in one collection’ (Jordanova, Schupbach 2010). The series of 16 life size etchings and accompanying publication has toured the UK and is currently held in the collections of the Wellcome Trust and the Victoria and Albert Museum. This collaboration between Anderson and Forensic Psychiatrist Dr.Tim McInerny (Bethlem Royal Hospital), enabled the artist to enter each individual’s environment; The Bethlem Royal Hospital, The Maudsley, London Health centres and schools, and even individuals homes. In this series of fourteen life-size etched portraits, the individual is identified, not by name and occupation, but visually, by their biographies and internal personal lives. Public and private self are united through Andersons curiosity and compassion; as her probing of inner worlds, as bizarre and entangled for the practitioners as the patients, links all the portraits together. The etchings explore medical ‘phenomena’ such as neuroses, phobias, traumas, disability, disease and injury. These portraits are ‘medical’ in a special and profound sense that notions of medicalization cannot capture.
This project toured the UK and has been exhibited at the Freud Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum where it is now in their permanent collections.
