A doctoral studentship awarded to Dr Amy Lineham will start in January 2025. The project is funded by the University of Surrey, in collaboration with Wellcome Collection. You can find out more about the PhD student and supervisory team below.

Follow the project here

Dr Amy Lineham joins the Mary Barnes research team following an MSc in Health History at the University of Strathclyde, undertaken with funding from a Wellcome Trust Master’s Studentship. Her dissertation ‘Painting is a Movement of Body and Soul’: Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall (1965-70) explored the role of Mary’s art within the Hall environment, both as evidence of her own therapeutic process but also how this impacted upon fellow residents’ experiences there.  Amy is committed to disseminating this research, presenting papers at the Society for the Social History of Medicine’s Biennial Conference ‘Resistance’ in July 2024 and at the Glasgow Medical Humanities Network, of which she is a member.

Amy’s further research will follow Mary’s artistic career beyond the Hall, addressing too her identities as a writer and mental health activist. Mary’s archive, recently acquired by Wellcome Collection with some of her artworks, offers an important first-person account of mental health experiences from both the heart of the British Anti-Psychiatry movement and its legacy. Amy aims to illuminate some of the tensions within this history by bringing Mary's archive materials and artworks into dialogue with shifting social and political conceptualisations of mental illness across the late 20th Century. Alongside this research, Amy works as Trainee Psychiatrist at South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. Her topics of interest are informed by issues encountered in clinical practice and she plans to draw upon Participatory Action Research models to involve service users in developing an understanding of, and context for, Mary’s life and work.

This collaborative PhD between the University of Surrey and Wellcome Collection will further Wellcome Collection’s aim to give voice to everyone’s experience of health, through Amy’s research on Mary’s experiences as a patient, artist, writer and activist. Amy will join the museum and library’s vibrant research community of collaborative PhD students and other researchers.

Professor Victoria Tischler, University of Surrey will be the lead supervisor for the studentship. She states: 

This project is the culmination of more than a decade’s work. I first saw Mary Barnes’s work in 2010, exhibited at SPACE gallery, London. I was struck by the emotional power of her art, it’s dynamic energy, and use of vivid colour. The story of the artist left a deep impression on me. 

There is still much to learn about her life at Kingsley Hall, her primal urge to express herself, and her later life in Scotland.  I am delighted to be collaborating with colleagues at Wellcome Collection to put the spotlight on Mary and her life and work as a visual artist, a writer and a mental health activist. 

The supervisory team includes Ms Elena Carter, Wellcome Collection and Dr Cheryl McGeachan, University of Glasgow. Dr McGeachan states:

I am thrilled to be part of this innovative and timely studentship. I came to Mary Barnes's work through my research into the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing and became captivated by her evocative artwork and moving life story. At a time where art and mental health is at an exciting critical juncture this project offers an opportunity to utilise the incredible archive of Mary's work to write new stories of mental ill-health and creativity from a lived experience perspective. The collaborative nature of the studentship provides an invigorating platform for new insights into Mary's life and work, generating a crucial foundation for further critical research with the collection.