By the mid-1960s, 0.7% of the Irish population were held in psychiatric hospitals. Ireland remains the country with the highest number of patients in psychiatric hospitals per capita at any one time in world history.
These institutions had a profoundly labyrinthine ability for loss and neglect, meaning that many patients spent far too long in inappropriate conditions.
The walls of a psychiatric hospital carved out a self-sufficient ‘otherworld’, this being the primary method of treatment. Cast on these walls is the experience of the thousands of people who passed through or, all too commonly, within these institutions.
Now that they’re gone, these histories face a new form of confinement in archives. My work is firmly based and justified through this archival and written research, translating the emotionality of the history of the everyday.
The large-scale institutions of Ireland’s past are gone, but the effects can still be felt.