What the fuck are you looking at
Indigo Daya, 2022
‘Appropriated’ hospital gown, mixed media installation
Art as Counter Archive
Confinement: spaces and practices of care and control, 5th International Conference for Carceral Geography, Arts West Atrium, University of Melbourne.
Artist statement
Carceral psychiatry locks our living bodies in Russian dolls and buries our unheard injustices in epistemic crypts (Daya, 2022). Along the burial route of ‘care’ is a procession of dehumanising, madness-enhancing moments.
During nine eleven* years of being in and out of psychiatric hospital, I often surrendered to it all. There was no escape from incarceration behind security doors, or from under diagnostic labels that obliterated my truth, citizenship and personhood. There was no escape from the drugs and electric shocks that erected invisible barriers between me and my thoughts, emotions and memories.
But there were small, precious moments, when choice and dignity was out of my grasp, but hospital property was not, and I appropriated whatever items I could. They took my cognitive functioning, but I took their blanket. They took something unspeakable in strip searches, but I stole their biro. These tiny liberatory acts were both pathetic and monumental.
This work is formed out of a hospital gown I appropriated after my first suicide attempt, it’s a contemplation on big-little cruelties and mad psychiatric practices.
Why would anyone put a distressed sexual abuse survivor in a revealing hospital gown, with a male security guard watching at the end of her bed? And then be surprised when she panics and tries to run away?
What possible use can endless psychiatric observations have in understanding the needs and experience of a human being in mental and emotional crisis?
What is it, really, that they’re looking at?
Reflections on this project
I was commissioned to make this artwork for the Carceral Geography conference, after publishing my academic paper: Russian Dolls and Epistemic Crypts (2022). It was an immense emotional journey, beginning with digging out a hospital gown I took home with me after one of many suicide attempts. I had so many of these attempts, it was an ongoing war between parts of me that felt I had to die, parts of me that were unsure, and parts that wanted to live.
For more than two decades this gown had lived with me, along with all the other small items I took after each indignity by the hospital.
The gown holds a story about how we humans sometimes find power in the most strange and small places, it’s a story I’ve heard again and again from other survivors. But it also speaks to one of many horrible and pointless practices in psychiatry: observations (aka surveillance).
Suspended in space, this gown was many things at once: an archival artefact from my own history, a dismembered body, a metaphorical internal landscape, and a site where viewers had to adopt the discomforting role of psychiatric observer/abuser—by peering up the skirt, down the sleeve and neck holes, in order to see the details inside the gown.
I made this piece in my loungeroom, tears mixed in with the glue. The fabric mache felt like plaster bandages wrapped around a wire skeleton. Each piece inside the gown referenced aspects of child sexual abuse that I was reliving at times I attempted suicide. Each piece of the story was unseen by nurses as they observed my mad body in a gown, instead of taking time to sit with me and truly listen. As I made, I took time to listen to myself.
Psychiatry’s focus on observing and controlling bodies is disturbingly similar to the way my abuser treated me. It’s one of many examples of how psychiatric systems obscure the humanity and stories of the people it claims to care about, but so often harms.
I made this little mock up gown in my early preparations for the installation. I keep it with me in my study, perpetually in resistance.
There’s a little reel of the installation over on Insta:
*For years I’ve been saying that I spent nine years in and out of psychiatric hospital. I truly thought that was right. Until last year, when I got my psychiatric records under Freedom of Information, and I learned that actually it was eleven years, not nine. Perhaps I am just forgetful. Perhaps it’s all the trauma. Or perhaps it’s just one more memory, of two years, that ECT stole from me.
My grateful thanks go out to Claire Loughlan and Diana Johns for commissioning me to make this artwork, and for so much support with this project and the Russian Dolls paper. It was a bloody tough time in my life, but you both held out lifelines that I actually wanted to grasp, without any pressure. Thank you.
