SERVICE-USER ART AND ACTIVISM


Art must ‘question what it is to be human’


With a renewed focus on co-production and inclusion in mental health, Hannah Chamberlain recently met up with Day Two keynote presenter* at next month’s DiMH 2024 conference, Dolly Sen – an artist, author, and activist, who uses her lived experience ‘to challenge, poke fun at, and interrogate’ the mental health system. The DiMHN CEO reports on an interesting discussion.


Dolly Sen’s arts practice crosses writing, performance, film, and visual art, and since 2004 she has exhibited and performed internationally. Her films have also been shown worldwide, and her journey as an artist has taken her up a tree in Regent’s Park, to California’s Death Row, to the Barbican, Tower Bridge, and the Royal Academy, to Trafalgar Square, and up a ladder to screw a lightbulb into the sky. Her work is seen as subversive,


humorous, and radical, and she is interested in debate and social experiment around themes of madness, sanity, the other, and acceptable behaviours, ‘from an unusual and unconventional position of power’. She is also interested in disability, and ‘the madness given to us by the world’. Her 25 years’ work in the mental health sector has seen her work with


organisations including the World Health Organization, the Welcome Foundation, SLaM, and the Bethlem Gallery, and – most recently – on a landscape commission with Hospital Rooms for Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust’s Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich. What follows is an edited transcript of


an interesting discussion between she and I, in which Dolly both talked over with me old times, and her hopes for the future.


Hannah Chamberlain (HC): “I’m so pleased to have a chance to sit down with you. For people who don’t know, we’re old colleagues from way back.” Dolly Sen (DS): “I remember I didn’t come out of my shell until the year 2000. Literally I was in my room for almost two decades, too scared to leave it – and then,


when I hit 30 – I thought, ‘No, I can’t live the rest of my life this way’. So I said I’ll go to stuff like coffee mornings and just try. I was 30, and was born in 1970, so that would have been the early ‘noughties’ that we met.” HC: “We met at Mental Health Media – and you were starting to make your films, and you wrote the book. Was that the first thing that you did?” DS: “Well, in 2000 I got a Millennium Award for £1000 to do something for my community, so I thought I’ll put on a play and make a few films about what it’s like to live with a mental health condition. So that was one of my very first creative things I did publicly; I bumped into my first publisher at one of those coffee mornings.” HC: “I don’t think there’s that same level of stigma now, but you forget what a closed world it was. What is the main thing that has changed since we started our campaigning careers, do you think?” DS: “I think it’s become more complicated – and has also gone backwards in some ways, and that is because there used to be a really strong sense of community, I remember. There were also a lot more organisations you could go to, like Mental Health Media, or a charity would give you a room to do something, which is no longer the case. Personally, I think it’s become harder to campaign.”


A growing wellbeing movement HC: “I suppose the wellbeing movement has grown. The thing that I fixate on as well is that while things have changed a lot for white, middle-class mental health, for people who are excluded from society for different diversity, and diverse reasons, it hasn’t really changed. There’s a risk that people get left behind because of EDI type issues. That’s not where we should be now.” DS: “Yes, I agree.” HC: “What motivates you now with your campaigning and artwork? How has it


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Dolly Sen’s arts practice crosses writing, performance, film, and visual art, and since 2004 she has exhibited and performed internationally.


THE NETWORK | MAY 2024 11


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