Bespoke Video Kiosk – Museum of East Anglian Life
Utilising the hospitals museum collection a permanent display has been developed in Abbot’s Hall. As well as presenting archived items, files and photographs for public viewing the Museum initiated a number of creative workshops which allowed members of the public to explore the collections and take a deeper look at the issues of mental health, with numerous art pieces being the result.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a vintage hospital bed surrounded by original furniture, providing an insight into the living standards of past patients, alongside the bed is a hospital screen which would have been used to provide patients with a small amount of privacy, this has also been turned into a thought provoking art piece with shadow figures of previous patients stitched into it alongside labels such as ‘psycho, whacko, schizophrenic’ shining a light on the use of such labels and questioning their impact on how we view mental illness (not screen pictured).
As part of the exhibition 2 videos were made, ‘Sticks and Stones’ which is a collection of thoughts on labels and expressions from people in Suffolk who suffer from mental illness, and ‘Case Notes’ – extracts from doctors’ notes kept in the Victorian County Asylum Case Books voiced by actors.
We were commissioned to design a free-standing video kiosk which would allow visitors to select each of these videos to watch. The kiosk was designed to fit aesthetically with the exhibition, sitting at the end of the hospital bed at the centre of the room. With an attractor screen slideshow depicting which video can be selected via each button, visitors simply push the button on the right or left to see each film.
