Abstract:
The thesis as a production of disciplined work presented in a creative style is
congruent with performance and presentation best practice in community arts. As a
practising nurse artist I create spaces of alternate ordering within the mental health
field environment.
I also inhabit the marginal space of the artist working in hospital environments. This
Other Place neither condones nor denies the existence of the mental health field
environment as it is revealed. Yet, it seeks to find an alternative to the power and
subjectivity of the [social] control of people with an experience of mental illness that
inhabit this place both voluntarily and involuntarily.
I have used a variety of texts to explore the experience and concept of Otherness.
The poems are intended to take you, as a reader where you could not perhaps
emotionally and physically go, or might have never envisaged going. They also
allow me as the author to more fully describe the Otherness of place that is neither
the consumer story nor the nurse’s notation, but somewhere alternately ordered to
these two spaces.
Drawing on the heuristic research approaches of Moustakas and literary
psychogeography , particularly the work of Guy Debord, this thesis creates the space
to explore the possibilities of resistance and change and the emergence of the identity
of the nurse artist within the mental health field environment.
