Mary Edith Barnes was an English writer who found her talent after 'journey through madness' in R. D. Laing's experimental community. Barnes suffered from schizophrenia but qualified as a nurse and worked with the British Army in the Middle East in the mid-1940s.
Background
Mary Edith Barnes was born on February 9, 1923, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, United Kingdom. She was the eldest child of four siblings. When Mary was a child, the family moved to the outskirts of London which was, at that time, the countryside. Mary's father was a lab technician and her mother was a homemaker.
Education
Educated at local schools, she trained as a nurse. As Mary failed her eleven plus examination, she was educated in a technical college, and at the age of seventeen pursued a career in nursing.
Career
During the second world war, Mary Barnes joined the army as a nursing sister, spending a year in 1945 working in hospitals in Egypt and Palestine before returning to Britain and London hospitals.
She suffered her first breakdown in 1952 and was admitted to a chronic ward at St Bernard's hospital, Southall, where she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was, however, discharged after a year and returned to work as a nursing tutor. Mary continued to nurse and teach but, unable to keep up with the demands of life on the ward, worked, for a time with mentally handicapped children. Because she had always felt no real bond with her parents, particularly with her mother, Mary was drawn to the theories of the psychiatrist James Robertson, who had worked with the eminent child psychiatrist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and made two influential films on child separation: A Two-Year-Old Goes To Hospital and Going To Hospital With Mother. Mary had used them on nurses training courses, and, when Peter, her 16-year-old brother, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, she wrote to Robertson.
In 1963, after reading Laing's book, The Divided Self (1960), she asked Robertson to help her contact Laing, who she felt could help both Peter and her; for the next year, she saw Laing for regular sessions. No longer able to work, she stayed at the Richmond Fellowship hostel, although her behavioral problems meant that staff found her increasingly difficult to deal with. After a few months at a Carmelite convent outside London, she worked part-time at a London youth hostel. In 1965, Mary moved to Kingsley Hall, at Bromley-by-Bow, a psychotherapeutic center set up by Laing and his colleagues as an alternative environment to the psychiatric hospital. Although she managed to get Peter admitted as a resident, it was not a successful stay and he left after a few weeks. He died in the 1980s.
From 1965-70, Mary was a patient of Berke at Kingsley Hall, and underwent regression therapy with him. It was during this time that she discovered her gift for painting, first using her own excrement, and then oil paints. As her condition improved, she worked with Berke on their book. Her canvases, full of vivid color - and often depicting religious imagery - were first shown in 1969 at the Camden Arts Centre in London.
After 1970, when Kingsley Hall closed, Mary helped Berke, who was a prime mover in setting up the Arbours Crisis Centre in north London. By now, she was having regular exhibitions and, during the next two decades, showed her work worldwide, usually accompanied by a talk on mental health and her experiences. She also lectured on mental health issues and the benefits of psychotherapy, particularly in Sweden and the US. In 1985, Mary moved to Scotland, where she continued to paint and exhibit. Something Sacred, her book of conversations, writings and paintings, was published in 1989. After contracting spinal arthritis, she was confined to a wheelchair but continued to paint, write poetry and travel.
Religion
Mary was a devout Catholic. Having converted to Roman Catholicism in her youth, religious imagery was often the subject matter of her paintings, depicted in powerful bright colors. It was one of these that for a period of time adorned the wall of the dining room at Kingsley Hall; a painting of the three stages of sacrifice, in which she notes the colors purple of passion, followed by green, for growth, perhaps emotions and actions that she used to remind herself of where she must direct her thoughts, and that she could compare her own struggles and successes to.
Views
Quotations:
"My paintings are an important part of my life, which lay buried for 42 years."
Personality
Mary was an extraordinary person, full of humor and vitality, exhibiting and encouraging younger painters well into her 70s.
Because Barnes' life hangs so heavily over her art, one feels somewhat constricted as a viewer – as, with the late works of Sylvia Plath, it’s hard to consider them without thinking of the maker’s pain. Initially, Barnes’ paintings resemble those of Howard Hodgkin: bold colors were well chosen in terms of stroke, shape and balanced design. Yet handwritten lines of text are often scrawled across the surface while figures from dreams crowd the backgrounds. She usually painted with her fingers, painting direct from her body to the outside world.
Quotes from others about the person
"Mary Barnes is a key character in the history of Bow and particularly the radical social history which is embodied in the remarkable Kingsley Hall, one time of home of Mahatma Gandhi. Nunnery Gallery is thrilled to have been invited by Dr. J Berke to show this collection of powerful paintings in Bow, where exactly 50 years before he started a remarkable creative partnership with Mary Barnes." - Rosamond Murdoch, Gallery Director