Alison Lapper: Lost in Parys

Author: Alison Lapper. Review by Rowena Loverance

There was depressing news recently for the creative arts in the UK, as the government cut funding for performing and creative arts courses at English universities. All the more reason, then, to celebrate a new initiative to encourage young people’s engagement with the arts, focusing on how art can help young people with their mental health and wellbeing by combating isolation and loneliness.

Entitled ‘The Drug of Art’, the project is a very personal response by artist Alison Lapper to the death of her son Parys. Alison gained worldwide fame when a representation of her, thirteen-foot high and naked, sculpted by Marc Quinn in brilliant white Carrara marble, sat for two years on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Alison was eight months pregnant at the time the sculpture was conceived; Parys was five by the time it reached the plinth.

He was a happy boy, we are told, but by the time he reached secondary school the bullying he was subjected to at school on account of his mother’s disability – Alison was born with no arms and shortened legs, due to the rare condition phocomelia – was taking its toll, and he began to worry about his own body image. He started taking drugs, and dropped out of school. Shunted around the mental health system, his condition deteriorated. He died of an accidental overdose in 2019, aged nineteen.

After five years of living with this grief, Alison Lapper has gone public in two ways. She has set up The Drug of Art charity in Parys’ memory; it will run art workshops to help children and adults use their love of art and making to express how they are feeling, so as to build confidence, curiosity, emotional wellbeing and resilience. There will be online masterclasses and podcasts in which artists from all walks of life talk about their experiences with mental health difficulties and how art helped them. Initially focused on 500 schools in the south of England – Alison is from Worthing – she is hoping to raise enough money eventually to make it a national project.

Alison is also showing the paintings she herself has made to channel her grief. The exhibition, at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, consists of some fifteen paintings, a site-specific installation, two works by Marc Quinn – a version of the original sculpture and a mother and child made when Parys was a baby – and two portrait photographs of Alison as she is today, by the international fashion photographer Rankin, who worked with her on a 2016 BBC documentary, No Body’s Perfect.

Spending time with Alison’s grief is a harrowing experience. When did I lose you? cries the title of one painting, as we see her son’s grotesque transformation from youthful beauty to bleeding out in death. A pair of paintings on a throbbing red background act as an exchange between mother and son; his plea for understanding, ‘I feel empty inside’, provoking her own sense of emptiness, ‘the enormity of the space you’ve left behind’. And the raging red extends into A Mother’s Anguish, a close-up of a mouth open in a scream, reminiscent of Henry Fuseli’s oil sketch, Head of a Damned Soul from Dante’s ‘Inferno’.

In contemporary art, perhaps the most visceral images of maternal love and grief have been produced by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz. Her shocking etching, Woman with Dead Child, was made in 1903, but it poignantly anticipates the death of her son Peter in the first world war. Although it is often considered to be Kollwitz’s most famous depiction of the cost of war, it was actually inspired by her experiences of Berlin’s inadequate medical services, where as a physician’s wife she witnessed untreated diseases and high infant mortality. One of the accompanying drawings to the piece, Mother and dead son (from the Koln Museum), shows a mother kissing her dead son, very much as Lapper depicts in her painting, The Final Kiss, as she too rages against the inadequate mental health services which failed her son.

Bethlem Museum of the Mind is located within the grounds of the historic Bethlem Royal Hospital, part of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Founded in 1247, and still providing mental health services, it is one of the oldest continuously-functioning institutions in the country. The Museum documents its varied history, as it moved over the centuries from Bishopsgate and Moorfields, via Southwark (the building which later became the Imperial War Museum) to its present site in Bromley in 1930; it also documents the struggle, not yet complete, to achieve understanding and parity of service for people with mental health problems. It is a highly appropriate venue for Alison Lapper’s exhibition.

Alison’s charity, The Drug of Art, launched a competition to accompany the exhibition, inviting young people under twenty-five to submit works illustrating either ‘My Reality’ or ‘My Happy Place’. The six winners get to see their work alongside that of the professionals; some of them also describe the mental health issues they are dealing with: anorexia, autism and bereavement. Joanne Mahmud, a winner in the twenty to twenty-five age group, was nine when her mother committed suicide. Her lonely white figure, trapped inside a black box, echoes the white figure of baby Parys on the floor above. Her work is entitled The Overload, which is certainly how I felt on leaving this extraordinary series of exhibitions. But privileged too, to experience so fully how art can connect us, to our younger and older selves, to those we have lost, and to each other.

Alison Lapper: Lost in Parys is at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Beckenham (www.museumofthemind.org.uk) until 2 June 2024.

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