The stark gallery space’s carefully curated artistry lines the walls. I take in the disparate arrangement of artwork and installations.
yellow jumpers
purple bruises
scalding burn
sedated snoozes
plastic bags
scarlet rages
bluebells
blank pages.
The words are stuck one by one on coloured tissue and look down at me from the white page. They are seemingly sporadic and childlike, but each stanza is intentional, packed with painful memories and truth.
‘The world is my oyster, but who am I?’ another one reads, pinned on a world map with coloured wool.
Next to it is the face of a man screaming into the abyss with a pained face, the shadow of a grim reaper looking figure behind him and a bony skeleton hand on his shoulder. ‘I will be with you always,’ it reads. It’s sinister and dark, a representation of the demon inside the artist.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind, held at Edinburgh’s Summerhall, is Scotland’s biggest mental health art exhibition and a vital space for people with mental health issues to express their feelings through their work.
“I ask what it was like to lose the exhibition and watch her face fall.”
At first glance, the exhibition feels bare. The expansive white room stands in stark contrast to some of the small, intricate works of art. But look closer, and each piece is brimming with so much emotion that the sparse room no longer feels empty at all. It’s overflowing.
Lauren Stonebanks, the founder of Out of Sight, Out of Mind, completed her fifth year of a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh before dropping out in 2002 when her mental health plummeted.
In the following years, she suffered from depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder – before finding an Edinburgh charity that turned her life around.
“This is our 13th year,” she tells me, as we sit at the far end of the room by her own artwork, “we were hoping that we’d probably have many more years to come, but we’ve just lost our funding”.
Last summer, Creative Scotland faced backlash after announcing plans to close its Open Fund – a vital support of up to £50,000 for independent artists. Although the decision was reversed a month later, it raised serious concerns about the future stability of arts funding in Scotland.
“I should have mentioned that everyone who submits an ARC has their own lived experience of mental health issues. It’s probably the most important bit, so of course I forgot it” Lauren laughs.
She tells me that there was a smaller exhibition the year before, but they wanted a venue where they could display 3D work. Then they stumbled across Summerhall.
“It’s the old vet school, so it has the oddest spaces in it, like laboratory galleries, dissection rooms, and lots of rooms with little cages, which was where our first one was,’’ she tells me excitedly. ‘’We’re like, ‘yep, this is weird. It’s our kind of weird. It’s perfect’”.
This year, however, they were told they’d lost their funding in a way that meant this year’s exhibition wouldn’t go ahead. Fortunately, the People’s Postcode Lottery came to the rescue and gave them enough that they could put this year’s exhibition on. But the future is looking bleak.
“They were saying we just didn’t provide enough of a return on investment. How do you quantify what this does? We’re an art exhibition where anyone who lives in Scotland who has a lived experience of mental illness can submit. We don’t turn artwork away. We don’t judge the artwork. We just accept everything, as long as we have space.
“That’s it. And providing it’s legal, of course” she giggles again.
I ask what it was like to lose the exhibition and watch her face fall.
“I honestly don’t know what I’d do with my life. When I found out we were going to lose the funding, I just shut down – it was like grief.
“It was like losing something that’s kept me well for 13 years. This exhibition saved my life. It’s given me so much confidence and self-esteem, a sense of self-worth, things that I thought I would never ever experience. The confidence to challenge my diagnosis and so now my diagnosis is no longer borderline personality disorder, it’s autism and ADHD.
“If it wasn’t for this and for meeting all the people involved, I would never have had the confidence to do that. And that’s just how it’s affected me. There are so many other stories like that. So many other people who’ve gotten involved just as a volunteer initially and then have gone on into paid employment. And it’s changed so many lives. I… I don’t know what I’d be without it. I know where I’d be if I’d never had it. My life would just be the old mess that it was, and nothing would have ever changed.
“I mean, to be honest, I’m not really thinking about that because I just tend to fall apart every time I think about actually losing it”.
“what happens when people lose the facilities they need in order to create.”
She asks if I want to see her own work, and I gratefully accept. She flicks through a homemade book filled with pages of collages, intricate drawings, wool shaped to make words, pictures of her family, dark scribbles and cut out holes. As she explains each page, I feel emotional at this honest form of expression and the deep connection she has with art that has so clearly turned her life around.
“When you’re struggling with words and you can’t quite express it, art can do that” she explains. “It can cross all kinds of divides or barriers that might stop somebody from understanding words. So many different things can impact your ability to understand and explain certain things, but with art, it can reach out over that, bridge that.
“And sometimes people will see things in there that maybe the artist didn’t intend, and it’s like, that actually makes sense. I mean, it’s so up to interpretation. Everyone interprets art differently. But it helps people understand mental health better and gets it out there, stops it being hidden away quite so much.
“The number of conversations I’ve had where people have come in, they’ve seen a piece, and they’re like, now I get what my family member friend is going through. I never really understood it before, but this has helped me understand that”.
As Lauren explains to me the importance of this exhibition, I am struck by how true her words ring out. Understanding your loved ones’ mental health struggles can be difficult, and it can be even harder for them to let you into their mind or explain how they feel. Art so clearly does help explain that, and even as I walk round an exhibition filled with artwork from people I don’t know, have no connection with, I am connecting. I am understanding these strangers, or at the very least attempting to.
Lauren’s story is just a small part of a much wider, broader issue. Funding cuts to grassroots projects like these demonstrate the worsening and worrying lack of support for art around Scotland.
And it’s not just Edinburgh. Glasgow, one of the UK’s most creative cities and celebrated for its art scene, is also suffering. Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts is being forced to close just a year after it secured three years of funding worth £3.4m from Creative Scotland. Glasgow’s Trongate 103 is also facing closure, causing concern among cultural organisations based there, such as GMAC, Street Level Photoworks and Glasgow Print Studio.
The local Scottish Labour MSP, Paul Sweeney, called the loss disheartening, saying these spaces “represents the heart and character of the city” and helped shape the city’s identity and played a key role in its past regeneration.
Sweeney is one of many pointing out the steady decline of Scotland’s cultural spaces. The Mackintosh building at the Glasgow School of Art is still a burned-out shell years after the fire; the Lighthouse, Scotland’s lost centre for architecture and design, is now privately owned, and the McLellan Galleries, once brimming with art, have been turned into office space.
It’s easy to see these losses as being simply about budgets and businesses, and a necessary cut for a wider investment. But they are about the people: the artists and visitors. It is about what happens when people lose the facilities they need in order to create.
Exhibitions like Lauren’s are integral spaces to allow humanity to connect and express. It is a collection of strangers letting other strangers into their worlds – their art, their thoughts, their minds and asking to be interpreted and understood. You are looking into their deepest secrets plastered onto a white page or a collage or sculpture. It is humans in their most exposed form, art in its most human. Losing important spaces like these sets an unsettling precedent for our future.
You may not think you are involved in the arts, but, as long as you are alive, you are. Culture is in all parts of life. It shapes and sustains Scotland’s people and places. It is in our education, our libraries, the concerts and festivals we go to, the ideas we have, the media we consume, the words we speak. It is nature and science and human connection. Without art, life is purely functional, ablack and white existence. The life full of hurt and emotion and depth that we all know is stripped of all colours, and earth becomes a rock.
Scotland is bursting with creativity, talent and potential. Yes, the people make Scotland, but the people want to make art. When we take away the opportunity for artists to make and share, can we truly be surprised when they want to move elsewhere?
Creating art is wearing your heart on your sleeve; it is the highest degree of vulnerability. With vulnerability, we build empathy. Who are we without that? And who are we, as a nation, to not do everything we can to protect that?
