COLLECTION I

During the 60s psychiatry was still in its infancy, resembling more of a social art-form rather than the science it is today. From 1965-1970 Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, East London became a home of a large, live-in community of trained psychiatrists, helpers, and people with varying psychoses. It was neither a hospital , nor an asylum, and, if invited to stay, everyone became a resident and, in theory, equal. People always seek some form of asylum somewhere. The person at the centre of this radical experiment was the charismatic psychiatrist RD Laing. He believed that if you allowed madness to take its natural course without intervention, without lobotomies and drugs and strait-jackets, and all the awful things they were doing at the time in mental hospitals – it would burn itself out, like an LSD trip working its way through the system.

One of the problems in retelling the Kingsley‘s Hall story is that it is simply impossible to cover all events since each one is a completely separate complex story.

The collection is inspired by this social experiment, where ten of the main characters of Kingsley Hall and their internal struggle for finding the right path are depicted artistically. We, all have the tendency to cluster people, based on their maddest edges, but sometimes a true harmony may be born out of striking differences. The perception of beauty is constantly changing and arguably fashion is the biggest expression of this. Transitory like craziness according to the interpretation of RD Laing. And this is the place allowing the unlimited expression of experiences and where one could find the long sought truth.