Cracked: Installation

An interactive installation developed by the Mad Heritage Collective exploring the hidden histories of madness in and around the Bloomsbury group

Take a seat at the table to piece together Charleston’s hidden histories of madness.

This interactive installation, curated by Charleston’s Curating Visibility Fellow and co-produced by the Mad Heritage Collective, draws on lived experiences of madness, ‘mental illness’ and neurodivergence to look back at the lives of 12 historic people connected to Charleston’s objects and spaces.

Featuring sound sculptures, found poems and illustrations in response to biographies, stories and the House, this installation invites visitors to touch, listen, view and piece together the fragments of a side of history often ignored.

This installation also features a set of plates celebrating 12 women and homosexual individuals whose experiences of madness resonate through objects and spaces at Charleston. This set includes three of the ‘Famous Women Dinner Service’ plates painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant alongside nine new plates painted by the Mad Heritage Collective.

Curating Visibility

This display is part of Curating Visibility, an initiative delivered in partnership with Accentuate and Screen South and funded by Arts Council England. Curating Visibility is a fellowship scheme for deaf, disabled and neurodivergent curators to uncover museum collections and reimagine disability perspectives.

‘Cracked’ contains references to ableism, addiction, anxiety, asylums, bathing, beauty, body shame, care, child sexual abuse, classism, coercive control, cooking, cross-dressing, desire, deviance, distress, divergence, drugs, excitement, exclusion, family, fantasy, fascism, feminism, friendship, gardening, gender non-conformity, infanticide, illness, institutionalisation, hearing voices, homophobia, homosexuality, hope, grief, love, marriage, miscarriage, misogyny, motherhood, music, obsession, nervousness, normality, play, pleasure, police, pride, psychiatric abuse, psychoanalysis, reading, resistance, sadomasochism, sanism, sculpting, seeing visions, sex, shopping, snobbery, socialism, suicide, trauma, travelling, painting, posing, wilfulness, work and writing.