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Finding Audrey Amiss

  • Serial
Photograph of the top left hand corner of a spiral bound, lined scrapbook. In the centre of the image is a passport photograph of a woman with greying hair, wearing glasses. Pined to her coat collar is a circular badge with the word 'FORCE' written across it. The photo is held to the page with a long strip of yellowing sellotape. There are several other strips of sellotape attached to the page, all running vertically. Handwritten to the right of the photo is the year '2003'.
PP/AMI/D/145: Scrapbook, Audrey Amiss. Source: Audrey Amiss at Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Living in and out of psychiatric hospitals, the artist Audrey Amiss documented her everyday life in a striking visual diary. When she died, her family donated her archive of hundreds of scrapbooks, sketchbooks and notebooks to Wellcome Collection. In this series, archivist Elena Carter writes about cataloguing and caring for the collection to understand the artist’s life, which is also the subject of the feature film ‘Typist Artist Pirate King’, directed by Wellcome Screenwriting Fellow Carol Morley.

Who was Audrey Amiss?

Elena Carter introduces the vast collection left behind by artist Audrey Amiss, who documented her life in astonishing detail.

Cataloguing Audrey

Work begins in earnest to restore order to the archive Audrey Amiss kept of the minutest happenings in her life. Like detectives, the archivists search for subtle clues to chronology in the mass of materials.

Audrey and her family

In working on Audrey Amiss’s archive, Elena is getting closer to understanding her. But the way her niece and nephew remember Audrey adds essential detail to the picture.

Conserving Audrey

Elena describes how specially designed storage allows Audrey’s scrapbooks to retain all traces of her creative process, although their intrinsic fragility means deterioration is almost inevitable.

Digitising Audrey

Building digital images of what Audrey created means that her work can be frozen in time – for the digital version, at least, the process of decay is halted, and any number of people can view it without the risk of damaging it.

Audrey in the world

As the collection is fully catalogued, the archive is opened up to the public. A feature film about Audrey premieres, and Audrey gets her own Wikipedia page, so people can learn about her. For archivist Elena, it’s time to step back.

  • Short film

Audrey’s archivist

In this short film, archivist Elena Carter talks about how she worked with Audrey’s scrapbooks to preserve her individual voice within her archive.

  • Short film

Audrey’s conservator

In this short film, conservator Stefania Signorello explains how she approached the unique challenge of preserving Audrey’s scrapbooks as she created them.

  • Short film

Audrey’s photographer

In this short film, photographer Thomas Farnetti demonstrates the techniques he developed to digitise and capture for posterity Audrey’s highly intricate scrapbooks.

About the contributors

Colour photograph of Elena Carter

Elena Carter

Author

Elena Carter focuses on developing the collections at Wellcome to challenge the way that we think and feel about health. Elena is particularly interested in radical and social histories and material that gives voice to marginalised groups. As Collections Development Archivist, she works directly with people to find the best home for their materials, with a focus on working collaboratively and ethically.

Head and shoulders photograph of a woman on a train, with neck-length hair, falling forward over her right cheek

Kate Wilkinson

Editor

Kate works at Pushkin Press. When not submerged in a book, she can be found walking or practising Spanish. Sometimes both at once.