Art and Academia Catalysing- Alana and Eric’s collaboration
Alana’s collaboration with artist and former medical doctor Eric Fong is crucial to the entire Horton project. The pair were introduced at Surrey History Centre by archivist Julian Pooley, where they were both conducting independent research. Eric was investigating surviving patient admission portraits from the Epsom cluster of asylums, while Alana, already working closely with the Friends of Horton Cemetery, was researching the cluster’s institutions, the lives of patients, and the history and legal status of the neglected cemetery grounds. Immediately, they saw an opportunity to catalyse one another’s work.
Given Eric’s academic medical background, he was able to grasp and translate Alana’s supplementary research into artistic practice; equally, Alana’s broad research interests, from art and literature to politics, ethics, and environmentalism, meant that she was able to respond to Eric’s creative process organically, informing and expanding his work with theoretical concepts and historical context.
As an artist, Eric was approaching the patient portraits through an aesthetic lens, with a particular focus on the photographic practices undergirding the images. Alana, in turn, was trying to find a path to historical justice for the thousands of patients buried in the neglected cemetery grounds. By combining Eric’s creative reflections with Alana’s broader exploration of institutional legacies, the duo found a way to bring larger issues back down to the personal, as well as to install the personal in larger struggles for historical justice. This duality, of the deeply personal invested in the photographic reproductions and the broad and inter-generational social impacts uncovered in Alana’s historical research, created a platform for addressing contemporary issues surrounding the treatment of the mentally ill and differently abled. Eric’s cyanotype prints were a way to individualize broad patterns of prejudice and institutional neglect: to confront the public with enlarged visages, to put actual faces to broader processes of discrimination, pathologization, and incarceration.
Alana began to cross-reference the photographed patients with the Friends of Horton Cemetery’s existing archive of patient biographies. By definitively locating the depicted patients in the Cemetery grounds, Alana and Eric were able to cement a connection between the images and the physical space of the burial ground, grounding the reproduction of their portraits to advocacy around the protection of the neglected site.
Situating the photographed patients in the Cemetery site also inspired the pair to consider the embeddedness of the patients’ bodies - their decomposed DNA – reanimated in the vegetation and trees of the overgrown landscape. This conceptual shift was reflected in a practical one: Eric transitioned from cyanotyping the portraits with blue ink to using ivy leaves foraged from the actual Cemetery site. This would quite literally imprint each reproduction with a trace of the patient’s physical form, generating a tether between their rejuvenated image, literal body, and final resting place. The idea of these vestiges, traces, and spectral ‘hauntings’ in the site and its vegetation has also found expression in Eric’s short film – ‘Apparitions’ – which is garnering awards and critical acclaim.
Naturally, ethical questions reared their head across Eric’s work, especially in the case of reproducing the patient portraits without the ability to gain consent from those long dead and photographed for diagnostic purposes. With her research background and skillset, Alana was able to co-produce an ethics statement for Eric, which will accompany exhibition display and contextualise his praxis. Alana was also able to historicise and navigate the ethical complexities involved in the ‘Asylum Needleworks’ series. Archivist Julian had shown Eric records of the Epsom patients’ needlework – sewing, quilting, knitting – which were meticulously kept by asylum staff. Alana presented two equally plausible explanations. On the one hand, this could be a case of regimented carceral exploitation, particularly of women’s labor, with patients producing clothing and textiles without pay that could be sold for the benefit of individual staff or the institution as a whole. At the same time, these outputs could function as a form of occupation and even industrial therapy: using crafts to stimulate patients, provide a creative outlet and instil self-worth. This moral ambiguity would prove to be a cornerstone in the creative process moving forward, informing Eric’s recreation of the items recorded in the logbook and their cyanotype printing, as well as the ethical framing of the project and how this has been presented to prospective venues.
Alana and Eric’s collaboration was not a traditional case of co-creation, but an exchange of ideas and melding of complementary expertise. The pair’s interdisciplinary backgrounds, creative dialogue and a ‘King’s Artist Residency’ (which included a series of workshops with secondary and university students) have powered a collaboration between art and academia – a combination that has evidently led to wide-ranging impact and the increased profile of Horton Cemetery.