a more domestic feel

Part of Once There Were Walls, Safehouse 1, London, 2019.

A speaker plays a selection of guidelines from the Department of Health’s ‘Health Building Note 03-01’ for Adult Acute Mental Health Units. Key features of the psychiatric profession are often embedded in these guidelines and environments, including principles of care, safety and comfort, but also risk management, security and surveillance. There is often a carefully controlled balance of the domestic and the clinical.

Four photographs found in my father’s storage documenting a range of unknown domestic interiors taken while looking for a flat to rent in London are mounted in polystyrene frames on the walls. My father worked as a psychiatrist in the US before moving to London with me and my mother.