Edward Lawrenson

Abandoned Goods is an essay film exploring the journey of one of Britain’s major collections of Asylum Art containing about 5,500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by about 140 people compelled to live in the Netherne psychiatric hospital in South London. Blending archive, reconstruction, animation, 35mm rostrum, and observational photography, the film explores the transformation of these objects from clinical material to revered art objects examining the lives of the creators and the changing contexts in which the objects were produced and displayed.

An investigation into the remote highlands of Liberia, where a once thriving mining town now stands abandoned, decaying and desolate: a concrete ruin in the West African bush.

Abandoned Goods is an essay film exploring the journey of one of Britain’s major collections of Asylum Art containing about 5,500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by about 140 people compelled to live in the Netherne psychiatric hospital in South London. Blending archive, reconstruction, animation, 35mm rostrum, and observational photography, the film explores the transformation of these objects from clinical material to revered art objects examining the lives of the creators and the changing contexts in which the objects were produced and displayed.

Abandoned Goods is an essay film exploring the journey of one of Britain’s major collections of Asylum Art containing about 5,500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by about 140 people compelled to live in the Netherne psychiatric hospital in South London. Blending archive, reconstruction, animation, 35mm rostrum, and observational photography, the film explores the transformation of these objects from clinical material to revered art objects examining the lives of the creators and the changing contexts in which the objects were produced and displayed.

An investigation into the remote highlands of Liberia, where a once thriving mining town now stands abandoned, decaying and desolate: a concrete ruin in the West African bush.