Audrey Amiss

Audrey Amiss

Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) was a UK artist, whose art was re-discovered and recognised after her death in 2013. Audrey Amiss won a scholarship to train in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, but was unable to complete her studies following her first mental health breakdown and incarceration at Warlingham Park Hospital, Croydon in 1958. After her time in hospital, Audrey trained as a shorthand typist and worked for the Civil Service in a typing pool. During her lifetime, Audrey Amiss was not well known as an artist and spent large periods of her life in psychiatric hospitals and units, often against her will and following arrest for civil disturbance.

Audrey was prolific in her artistic output, and is known to have created hundreds of sketches, paintings and other artworks over the course of her life. Much of this work was not seen publicly; while Audrey entered her work for submission in exhibitions and prizes or showed work at open exhibitions, she often expressed frustration at the formal art scene and her lack of recognition as an artist: "I was once in the tradition of social realism, also called the kitchen sink school of painting. But I am now avant-garde and misunderstood."

Audrey described her work as "a visual diary", and her drawings and paintings took their subject matter from the world around her, including still life, landscapes, local scenes, portraits, figures and objects. Amiss also meticulously recorded details of her daily life in a series of journals, log books, account books, record books, photo albums and scrapbooks. Each of these series of volumes was used for a defined purpose, from recording summaries of letters sent (record books), money spent and received (account books), log books (diary-type daily entries), and scrapbooks and photo albums (food eaten, junk mail and collected ephemera).

Audrey Amiss died in 2013 at the age of 79, having lived in semi-reclusive lifestyle in her later years. When her family cleared the home, they discovered hundreds of sketchbooks, scrapbooks, photograph albums, account books, record books and log books, spanning from Audrey's early life up until the day of her death on 10th July 2013. The sketchbooks alone contain an estimated 50,000 individual sketches, with Audrey often filling entire volumes in one sitting or over the course of a single day.

In 2014, Audrey Amiss' family donated the collection in its entirety to Wellcome Collection, a library and museum in London which focuses on human health and medicine.

A film inspired by Audrey Amiss' life is currently in production, written and directed by Carol Morley and produced by Cairo Cannon. The film, Typist Artist Pirate King, draws on the extensive archive of Audrey Amiss at Wellcome Collection and imagines a road trip of Audrey Amiss and a psychiatric nurse. The film was made following Carol Morley's time as a Screenwriting Fellow at Wellcome Trust from 2015, where she encountered Audrey Amiss' archive and undertook extensive research to develop the film.

Personal life

Audrey Amiss was born and grew up in Sunderland with her parents, Arthur and Isabelle (Belle) and sister, Dorothy. As a child, Audrey attended Bede Grammar School for Girls, where teachers noticed her artistic capabilities. After school, Amiss went on to attend the Sunderland College of Art, before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy School of Art in London in 1954. Audrey studied painting at the Royal Academy but withdrew from her studies in 1958 following what she described as her first breakdown with manic depression. After her time as an in-patient at Warlingham Park Hospital, she did not return to the Royal Academy. Instead, Audrey Amiss trained as a shorthand typist and worked as a typist for the Ministry of Labour from 1962, and later at Stockwell unemployment benefit office, where she varied her hours of work in periods of poor or unstable mental health. For most of her adult life, Audrey lived in South West London, in Clapham, with her mother Belle, who had sold the family shop in Sunderland to be nearer to Audrey. Belle died in 1989, after which time Audrey lived alone in the flat in Clapham, until her death in 2013, though her family maintained contact and provided her with support.

Audrey Amiss was a keen traveller, and

From 1977, Audrey Amiss began assembling photographs and other found materials (mostly newspaper cuttings and junk mail) into photograph albums. Audrey's photographs were mostly from her holidays and travels, visits to London Zoo and other local scenes and objects. Volumes also included cuttings from newspapers, junk mail and other ephemeral material, including some food packaging. From the late 1990s, Audrey shifted to using mostly lined A4 refill pads, and the content of the scrapbooks was mostly food packaging and associated everyday ephemera (eg, envelopes, letters, newspaper and magazine cuttings, and packaging from household goods). Audrey added commentary and contextual information to these items, such as where and when the item was purchased, associations to the design, and how it tasted, as well as longer-form associations and thoughts arising from the items.

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Mental health

Over the course of her life, Audrey was admitted to psychiatric hospitals on numerous occasions and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Audrey often maintained that she was not ill and did not want to be in hospital or on medication. Audrey spent time in a number of psychiatric units over the years, including Ryhope General Hospital (now Hopewood Park Hospital), Warlingham Park Hospital, Tooting Bec Hospital, South Western Hospital (Nelson Ward), Charles Clinic Chelsea, South London and Maudsley and Elizabeth Ward (St Thomas' Hospital). In 2000s, Audrey launched an appeal to the Mental Health Review Tribunal which was eventually unsuccessful.

Audrey Amiss described herself as a Mental Health Survivor and was involved with local mental health charities and Survivor networks. She took part in demonstrations on mental health and one of her exhibitions "

Art

Audrey Amiss' artwork is thematically rooted in the real world, with works taking their subject matter from her surroundings, including people, street scenes, objects, landscapes, and nature. The style of her work varies, with early works favouring more naturalistic renditions and use of oil, gouache, and pastels, whereas later works are more abstract and gestural, and tend to use pencil or pen, as well as block colour compositions in paint. Audrey Amiss' sketches and paintings are characterised by their hasty composition, with numerous sketches composed in quick succession (for example, entire volumes from a day at London Zoo, observing traffic in Oxford Circus, or from a single life drawing class). Audrey Amiss dated and annotated virtually all of her drawings with their subject matter and date.

Audrey Amiss also created compositional works using found material such as junk mail, food packaging and newspaper cuttings, which were pasted into scrapbooks.

In popular culture

Audrey Amiss' life is the subject of a feature length film, Typist Artist Pirate King, written and directed by BAFTA-nominated film maker Carol Morley, with filming starting in November 2021. The film is financed by the BFI, BCP Asset Management, MBK Productions, LipSync and Genesis Entertainment with support from Wellcome and development financing from BBC Films and the BFI.