Luke 'Luca' Cockayne: Trauma Dump

How can we safely curate art about mental health?
How do we hold the need for witnessing, sharing, and catharsis with the risks of triggering and re-traumatising?
How crazy is an artist allowed to be, both in and outside the gallery?
Is visual art inherently healing for psychiatric distress?
How comfy should the seating in an art gallery be?​​​​​​​

Welcome to Trauma Dump!

Opening Performance: Thursday 17th October from 4pm to 4am

Continues: Friday 18th October to Sunday 27th October, 1pm to 1am

Location: Saltspace Gallery, Floor 2, 54 Washington Street, Glasgow, G3 8AZ

Online:


Luca will be using Instagram Live for online sharing during the opening performance and whenever they are present in the space at @luckycockayne.

The Concept:

A thick black line of tape cuts the gallery floor in half. At 4pm artist & writer Luke 'Luca' Cockayne crosses the line and takes his 'morning' medication: Setraline, Quitiapine, Proprananol. Then he'll start to unpack everything he's ever made in relation to mental health and neurodiversity.

As he unpacks he'll touch up old paintings, finish hand-binding poetry pamphlets, re-print old zines, project films (including premiering the film version of his recent Edinburgh Fringe solo show), and re-read and re-read and re-read the hundreds of thousands of words he's written about his time in psychiatric hospital, his various overdoses and self-harming behaviours, his miscarriage, his... unwell life.

Luca is not trapped. Sometimes he'll re-cross the line to go outside for a smoke, or to lay on the soft comfy seating provided for the audience, but for the majority of the next 12 hours he'll sort through the visual manifestations of his trauma.

At 4am, all being well, he'll break the black line, take his 'evening' medication - Quitiapine and Proprananol - and go home.

The aftermath will remain in the gallery for ten days and nights, available to view and interact with by anyone who's willing to step over the broken black line. Luca will try to be there to chat and answer questions and ideally sell or give away some of the zines and artwork.

Is it safe?

As safe as we can make it.

We've got emergency medication and the phone numbers of various people involved in Luca's mental health care including his psychiatrist and out-of-hours services. There will also be continuous monitoring of the performance by artist’s assistants and trusted invigilators.

We're going to ban the colour 'red' from the space. This reflects an observation about the lack of the colour red in psychiatric hospital wards, as explained in Luca’s poem ‘I Never Promised You A Rose Garden’ – shortlisted for the Scottish Mental Health Writing Awards in 2018 – which says;

“I thought it clever, as a self-harmer,

To line our outdoor cage with thorns.

Having learnt that red is the most hated colour in these places,

Encouraging anger, implying blood flowing from skin ripped and torn

Again. To stem the psychological torment,

Replaced with tiny trickles of metallic-tasting red.

The blood so reassuring

Silencing delusions.

I resist the urge to push myself through the bushes, like I used to.”

We’ve decided to reflect this observation by banning the colour red from the space. Please try to wear blues and neutral colours (fabric coverings will be provided). Don’t feel you need to cover up your own scars though, this exhibition is not about shaming or condemning self-harming behaviours, but rather aims to open a dialogue.

We've got comfy seating, bathrooms available (though unfortunately they're gendered), an area to smoke outside, and a kitchen area to make tea and coffee.

We encourage you to bring what you need to keep yourself calm and safe. Alcohol is also welcome, but please bring your own booze.

Why do this?

October is the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. Last year for the festival Luca took part in and curated the exhibition Hard To Look At at Whitespace in Edinburgh, which asked the question: 'How do we show ‘difficult’ art without re-traumatising the artist or harming or triggering the audience?' However, a satisfying answer to this question takes time. To go further back, it’s four years since Luca spent his MFA in Art & Humanities exploring how text-based painting can be used to process trauma, and he’s spent several more years trying, without success, to wrestle his fragmented memoir about his time in psychiatric hospital into a publishable shape. Works related to this project have been shown at Summerhall, Turner Contemporary, CCA Glasgow, but at this point Luca feels that he can no longer sort through this material himself. He invites you to help. In the process he's looking forward to enjoying a couple weeks of not having all this stuff in his one-bedroom apartment.

Why should I come along?

Have you seen Luca's art before? If so, you'll probably enjoy this. Did you visit Luca when he was in psychiatric hospital in 2017? If so, this will be much easier to witness (because of the stabilising medication and the nice calm gallery setting) and you can be safe (because of the conceptual barrier forbidding Luca from communicating directly with the audience).

Also, if you're a curator or a literary agent or a gallerist or an art dealer and you have an interest in work about mental health and neurodiversity... this will make more sense than trying to visit Luca's home studio.

This sounds great, I can’t wait to help out! Can I join in with the performance?

We ask that the audience doesn’t cross the black line into the space during the 12-hour durational performance. After 4am on the opening night the black line will be broken and the audience can then interact with the work for the rest of the exhibition’s run.

You'll like this if you like work by:
Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Tracey Emin, Kira O'Reilly, Sarah Kane, or anything Luca did when he was still called Ana Hine.

You won't like this if:
You dislike walls of text.

Venue Access Info:

Luke 'Luca' Cockayne is a disabled artist and is keen to make the event as accessible as possible without compromising his own safety or overreaching his capacity.

Saltspace Gallery is not wheelchair accessible and requires visitors to climb a large number of stairs and walk down a long corridor. The lighting inside is industrial. The venue is close to Anderson Station and a five minute walk from Central Station.

This is our first Eventbrite event and we can’t work out how to set the times to go past midnight, but this event is deliberately going until 4am because, as Luca puts it, "4am is the worst time to still be awake and battling the voices in your head and the time when the world's patience seems to be at its thinnest".