Launching the Edward Adamson Festival!
The Edward Adamson Festival, launching on Wednesday 12 February, is a celebration of the life and work of artist Edward Adamson (1911-1996). Adamson is widely known as the pioneer of using art and creativity to promote recovery and healing in the hospital environment. He is also the founder of the Adamson Collection, one of the major international collections of art objects made by people who lived in European mental asylums. It holds about 5500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by people at the British long-stay mental hospital, Netherne.
The Collection is important in the histories of British asylums and post-war psychiatry, of art therapy and Jungians and of Outsider Art: encouraged and collected by an artist Edward Adamson, rather than a psychiatrist, and strongly representing the work of women.
The festival represents the first major survey of Adamson's life and work since his death in 1996. It will be running across four main venues and includes three exhibitions and a programme of events. Further details about the festival can be found here .
