"Umbels #1"
Abandoned Psych Hospital, Seacliff, Otago, South Island, New Zealand
The passage of time & the processes of nature have worked their transforming magic (the Japanese call this kind of thing wabi sabi…look it up) on the refrigerator door, in the wall of an abandoned psychiatric hospital at Seacliff, just outside Dunedin, NZ. The resulting subtlety of colour & pattern is contrasted by the harsh, but natural, lines of the umbels.
Just out of interest…this is the psych hospital in which Janet Frame (NZ author & poet), the subject of the film “Angel at my Table”, was incarcerated back in the 1950s, having been misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. She was actually suffering depression, and of course the treatments for schizophrenia hadn’t worked & they were about to get drastic with her. She narrowly avoided a lobotomy when news arrived that she had just won a prestigious literary prize with the publication of her first volume of short stories and the chief psychiatrist decided that the doctors must have got something wrong, and cancelled the operation!
