“The Empathy Clinic”, The Big Anxiety Festival (2019)

“In this large-scale exhibition, engaging with art, mental health and lived experience, Wart was commissioned to recreate an image of a painting from the 1990s, The Isolation Room as a three-dimensional space. The space, designed by Anna Tregloan, faithfully reinterpreted Wart’s painted environment of a cell that she occupied in a mental hospital in the 1990s. The original painting was rendered in baby-blue paint, with the room’s bed and barred windows represented in oily bitumen. The bed in the recreated room was flocked and covered in black, fake fur. On the bed, audience members could lie down and listen to a soundtrack of poetry read by wart, accompanied with music by Phil Downing. The installation, unravelling moments from a torn mind reached back into Wart’s past experiences, bringing a memory to new life.”