When Night Draws In: An Artangel Interaction project with MIND

‘When Night Draws In’ is a project in the Artangel’s Nights of London series that helps artists develop creative projects in collaboration with people who have a special connection to the night-time. Selected to work on the project owing to her specific affinity to the night-time as a subject, Woodfine’s concerns within the project were to investigate how she could creatively collaborate through art practice to make new work, and to discover who she could share this practice with in this context.

Over a two-year period preceding this project, Woodfine worked with a group from the Heathside Centre run by Wandsworth MIND and identified this group to provide the focus for the artistic collaboration. Two groups from Wandsworth MIND, a charity that provides community-based social care for people who experience long term mental health issues, were brought together based on the criteria of an interest in drawing and a preparedness to work from the imagination, and to generate works through drawing and discussion that investigated the theme of the nocturnal city.

The outcome of the ten-week project working with 14 adults, who use the mental health resources run by Wandsworth MIND, was the production of imagery developed through the working methods of Woodfine’s creative practice in drawing, and through a collaborative working process. Collective experimentation with the transformation of drawing into pop-up model landscapes and theatre sets facilitated a set of final images that play on the apparent three-dimensionality of dream-like worlds, framed by Woodfine’s illusionistic rendering of picture frames to present their images, the images embody the process undertaken.