Graham Harwood (Mongrel)
«Rehearsal of Memory»

The aim of this piece was to work with a group of people from Ashworth a high Security Mental Hospital to produce an interactive programme embodying the life experience of those involved. This is manifested in the form of an anonymous computer personality made up of the collective experience of the group. Ashworth Hospital is located in the north of England near Liverpool and is home and prison to people who are a danger to themselves or to people outside the hospital.
The group of patients I worked with ranged from serial killers to rapists, potential suicides and casualties of the excesses of society. The staff I worked with included psychiatric nurses of twenty years experience and orderlies.
This artwork is about the recording of the life experiences of the client group that are a mirror to ourselves (‹normal society›) and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society. This forgetting is a dark shadow cast by plenty, a nightmare for some that constructs misinformation and fear about insanity, violence and victims.
This mental space is occupied by the psycho, the nutter, the mad dog and Bedlam; this is the space where strong fictions lie and invisibly glue together the mirror from which we view our own sanity. This work is about people everywhere who are trying to remember the faces of the extras in the cinema of history. This artwork is a rehearsal of memories not quite forgotten. Evil, sleazy, dirty, dangerous, sick, immoral, crazy, or just plain normal.
Graham Harwood