In hospital, on top of a hill near a common in Woolwich. Who knew Woolwich had a nice part? Who knew hospitals could still be so ghastly? I’ve been here several times in the last week. The department I’m being examined by has relocated. It feels like there is a sense of organisation, but the process is designed to elongate time, to make people wait, to occupy whole days, to lose sense of reality, to be away from natural light and external stimuli. They are the most unhealthy places. I’ve travelled here in the early hours, and home after dusk, on shaky buses which disrupt my internal organs. When at home my mind has been adrift due to medication. I haven’t had contact with anyone. The nurses are friendly and pleasant, but too busy to engage for long. Billy is fit. Each day involves arrival, waiting for hours, having tubes attached to me, acquiring bruises, thinking about my purpose and destiny, making lists in my head of what to do when I get home, having no energy to do those things, choosing to watch something, failing to decide what. Sleep is haunted by dreams. I wake at random times, hallucinating, frightened, discombobulated.
Lack of contact is the worst part. I’ve felt paranoid, trapped, lost, futile, irrelevant, aimless. I look for things to do to fill the empty time but why? Once I’ve filled it there will be more time straight after, empty time, blank time.
Conversely, space is just full. Full of worthless junk that accumulates. I have time next week to start processing all that, sneaking items out at night, re-discovering relics, then letting go. Eventually I will have an entirely empty room serving no purpose. Maybe everyone should have an empty room. “This room left intentionally blank”. That full room of mine has bad vibes. I didn’t use it at all when I moved in. I tried to sleep in there, but always felt unsettled. Now I don’t use it again. I might be able to use it as a studio for painting and photography but I’d rather not do it in there, I’ll just pretend the room doesn’t exist. Once my positive room has more space I can do studio work in there. I try to keep Syd Barrett’s room in Earls Court in mind as something to aim at. I won’t paint, my work is small, digital, virtual these days. Photographs. Text. Writing. Flat, unmoving images seem calmer, simpler. They’re able to just exist. At art school we were taught to overthink. I think I’ve recovered from that now. Outsider art is about being untaught. I don’t like anyone else influencing anything I do.
I do have to think about who sees the works I make, when I do make them, though. I think leaving them out in public space is best, easiest, most independent. It is good to let go of the works and be free of them too. Nothing could be worse emotionally than rooms full of paintings no one looks at. When I’m well enough I can go looking for locations, sites, sewage works, reservoirs, municipal housing stairwells, places to receive situationist text pieces on yellow paper. It is important that they are on yellow, although I’m not sure why. Very bright, it must be.
The river isn’t enough for me now. It doesn’t give anything back to me. I blame it for something, something lacking in my present life. I don’t go there now. I don’t think about it. I’m over this place. Waiting to move on.
Andrew Stevenson 