Evolver - May and June 2021

20 SERENA CURMI Her interest in people incarcerated in asylums was triggered by an article she read about Bethlem Hospital in London. Her initial research led her there and she spent a day in their archive, examining the admission books from the late 1800s. Returning home Curmi visited Bristol Archives, which house The Bristol Asylum records, to continue her research. Many of the photos were damaged, but of those that were usable it was often the expression on a face, hinting at their emotional state, that arrested her attention. The reasons for an individual’s admission and notes about their behaviour and treatment made sobering reading. The most common diagnosis was ‘Melancholia’ which seems, since ancient times, to have been used as a catch-all term to describe a range of physical and mental ailments. This self-imposed project, although intended as a sideline to her main landscape work, began to haunt her. She wandered the streets of Bristol finding the houses where these people had lived, feeling that it provided an added Three women dressed in demure Victorian high-necked dresses look out across the years from these tiny portraits. Despite their vulnerability these are strong faces, they defy their reduction to the anonymity of a number. The artist gives them back their dignity and makes them visible again. These paintings of unnamed women won for SERENA CURMI the Evolver Wessex Artist Prize in the Royal West of England Academy 168th Open exhibition. Curmi is not a portrait painter. She trained as an illustrator at Falmouth, but abandoned illustration for Fine Art, initially ‘making painterly and ethereal paintings of women but not from photographs’. The seismic change to her life when she became a mother led her to rethink her practice as well as her life. She turned to landscape, making paintings of the mountains she had encountered during her extensive travels to locations as far apart as Patagonia, Banff in Canada and New Zealand. Simultaneously she started the asylum portraits using ‘a similar monochromatic palette for both subjects’ and in both referencing old photography. dimension to her understanding of the face before her. Concealing the identity of her subjects was deliberate, and their anonymity emphasises the fact that once admitted these people no longer had an identity. Curmi felt that she was ‘tapping into our deep fears that it could have been any one of us, had we lived during that time’. She started reading about Victorian London and the social implications of Victorian morality, but she is wary of the pitfalls of the project developing beyond the visual to a time-consuming examination of Victorian social mores. She has produced dozens of these little paintings of both men and women, working in oils using thinners, so the process is more akin to the technique of watercolour than that of oil painting. In her mountain paintings, the scale is larger and less delicacy is required so she pushes the paint around with rags rather than using fine sable haired brushes. The portraits are worked on ten centimetre square sanded board, which provides a very smooth surface but enough tooth remains to hold the paint. It helps to retain the faded sepia quality so typical of early photography. Many of the images were taken outside set against a backdrop of bushes or a brick wall, presumably the garden of the asylum. Given that they were taken in the early days of photography, the available equipment would have necessitated daylight. The photos are decontextualised by removing the backgrounds and consequently standardising them in a way that emphasises the consequences of an individual’s institutionalisation. It was a new departure for Curmi to work directly from photographs. She makes numerous preparatory pencil drawings from these tiny images in order to learn the contours of a face and absorb the expression. The result is powerful, sensitive portraits of women who were deprived of their freedom and largely forgotten by society. Poignantly they are now remembered, immortalised in paint, but are still only identified by a number. Fiona Robinson serenacurmi.com VISUAL ARTS L-R: ‘BRISTOL LUNATIC ASYLUM CASE STUDIES 13 + 14 + 15’