Madlandscape

A continuation of our collaboration with designer and researcher Benjamin Koslowski and artists the vacuum cleaner and Hannah Hull the model marked the next iteration of Madlove and built on the success of the project’s beta version at FACT, Liverpool.

For this second stage of the project, the artists continued their tour of the UK and several European locations - developing ideas in collaboration with mental health service users, professionals, family members and carers. This body of research has been utilised to formulate a series of spatial conditions for a wilfully utopian landscape of good mental health. On display at The Wellcome Collection in London, the Madlove exhibit forms the climax of the Bedlam exhibition. This provocative show charts changing attitudes to mental health through the lens of Bethlem Hospital - from the birth of the asylum to the current and complex landscape of mental health.

Our contribution was a large architectural model that proposed a landscape approach to the design of mental health care environments. Its topography mixes mutual care, self-led activity, individualised support and communal creation. The diversity of spatial conditions and privacy levels enables opportunities to connect or retreat, play or plan, distract or discuss.