With a renewed focus on co-production and inclusion in mental health, Hannah Chamberlain recently met up with Day Two keynote presenter* at next month’s DiMH 2024 conference, Dolly Sen – an artist, author, and activist, who uses her lived experience ‘to challenge, poke fun at, and interrogate’ the mental health system. The DiMHN CEO reports on an interesting discussion.
Dolly Sen's arts practice crosses writing, performance, film, and visual art, and since 2004 she has exhibited and performed internationally. Her films have also been shown worldwide, and her journey as an artist has taken her up a tree in Regent's Park, to California's Death Row, to the Barbican, Tower Bridge, and the Royal Academy, to Trafalgar Square, and up a ladder to screw a lightbulb into the sky.
Her work is seen as subversive, humorous, and radical, and she is interested in debate and social experiment around themes of madness, sanity, the other, and acceptable behaviours, 'from an unusual and unconventional position of power'. She is also interested in disability, and 'the madness given to us by the world'. Her 25 years' work in the mental health sector has seen her work with organisations including the World Health Organization, the Welcome Foundation, SLaM, and the Bethlem Gallery, and — most recently — on a landscape commission with Hospital Rooms for Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust's Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich.
What follows is an edited transcript of an interesting discussion between she and I, in which Dolly both talked over with me old times, and her hopes for the future.
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