England’s oldest psychiatric hospital stages haunting new exhibition of patient art

England's oldest psychiatric hospital is exhibiting never-before-displayed creations by its patients in a new show exploring sleep, dreams and nightmares.

'Between Sleeping and Waking', at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, draws on two centuries of work, much of it produced by people treated at the hospital - from an ode to a dead pet squirrel, written by a man who once tried to assassinate George III, to contemporary installations made from bedsheets scrawled with anxious late-night thoughts.

Housed within the grounds of Bethlem Royal Hospital, which has been running since 1403 and inspired countless cultural depictions of madness - most notably Bedlam, a 1946 horror film starring Boris Karloff – the museum has paired these artworks with research into the most common dream types shared across cultures.

"What we've done is taken the work of sleep researchers and they've developed a taxonomy of the dreams that are most commonly shared widely across society and across cultures as well," explains Colin Gale, Director of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. "And then we've gone to our museum's rich collection of reserve artworks and we've managed to find a picture that kind of illustrates every single one of those archetypes as it were."

Nightmares on canvas

One of the most striking works on display in the show is Nightmare (1953) by William Kurelek, a Canadian artist who was treated in London in the early 1950s. His canvases served as a kind of dialogue with his doctors - visual attempts to map his internal terrors.

"What he did was painted for his doctors scenes that tried to explain to them all of his preoccupations and difficulties and in particular this picture called Nightmare is a composite of all the many nightmares that dogged him at the time," says Gale.

Up close, the painting becomes even more disturbing. "This one is… a really disturbing depiction of him imagining what it would be like if he had his father - with whom he had a difficult relationship - at his mercy and he was bashing his brains out with a rock," Gale points out.

The exhibition also gives space to the experience of insomnia. Kate McDonnell’s installation Night Tides is monumental, made from duvets, pillowcases and bedding inked with frantic, looping lines of text - the kind of irrational worries that surface in the small hours.

"So this artwork is about insomnia and the weird state that we occupy in the middle of the night. So it's made from duvets and pillowcases and bedding and it's all written over with those kind of anxious thoughts that we have, the irrational weirdness that insomnia really generates. And a lot of my work embodies uncomfortable, intangible feelings," says McDonnell.

"What I hope people get from this piece of work is that they're not alone in what they're feeling," she adds. "Because I think it's a universal truth that everybody has experienced, insomnia in some way. And I like that kind of link that we all have as human beings, whether you're very little or much older."

'Between Sleeping and Waking' runs until 8 November at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Beckenham, London Borough of Bromley. Check out the video above for more footage of the exhibition.