BAD HAND
INSTALLATION, 2013
JANE PROPHET (UK)
Jane Prophet thought about the ‘rules’ that define psychotic behaviour and tried to behave according to those rules herself, to try and trigger a psychotic state of her own. To induce a psychotic episode in herself would close the gap between her and her stalker, to resist the urge to make the man who stalks her ‘other’. The video piece is in homage to the allegedly psychotic patient of a psychiatric institution, Emma Hauck. Her letters are typified by one (circa 1909) in which she repeatedly wrote “Sweetheart, come” until the page of paper is reminiscent of a field painting, a dense layering of text that becomes image.
These letters from the asylum to her husband, have been exhibited in the past as artworks. They are labelled with her name and her apparent mental illness, as though it (if it were accurately diagnosed) was as much the author, or the letters-cum-artworks were a gauge or expression of her illness. Jane finds it hard to believe that Emma wrote on the understanding that she was making art and that they would be exhibited in a gallery after her death. Jane thinks that they were letters willing her husband to visit. To rescue her from the asylum? The implication of these being in the Prinzhorn Collection is that her letters were never sent. If this is the case she was doubly betrayed, once by whomever she entrusted the letters to and secondly by the re-branding of them as art.
If such writing was an expression of psychosis, could a state of psychosis be induced, temporarily by writing in a similar way? Jane sat in a small soundproof room and wrote the first phrase that came to her, repeatedly, until the physical pain in her hand made her stop. She used a Livescribe pen, with audio which enabled her to playback, in real-time, the act of writing (and the sound of her hand and pen as she wrote) and make video.
BIO:
Jane Prophet is a British artist who works across media and disciplines to produce objects and installations, frequently combining traditional and computational media. She often collaborates with life scientists: stem cell researchers, mathematicians and heart surgeons to radically re-envisage the human body. Prophet also makes works that analyse our experience of contemporary landscapes, such as the animation Decoy (2001) and the photographic work The Landscape Room (2001) that combine images of real and algorithmic landscapes. Her ten year interest in 3D printing began with Model Landscapes (2005) that includes miniature trees 3D-printed from mathematical data. She spent 2015 working with neuroscientists making work about art, meditation and death.