Updated Opening Hours: Friday – Monday 12-4pm

Private View: Friday 21 July 6-9pm

“There is a pattern of sometimes rapid fluctuation from periods of confidence to despair” – Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder Types and Symptoms

Layla Francine Weschke Boyd (aka Layla the Impaler) presents a solo show comprising of drawings made during and after her stay in a psychiatric hospital. The sketch-book-scale works in stark ink and luminous wash depict the various flora of the hospital, both cultivated in its grounds and gardens, and presented in vases on its wards. In this strange context, flowers function to soothe the clinical edges of the environment, and to tether those inside with their loved ones, friends and family beyond its walls who send bouquets as tokens and avatars of love and care.

Layla comes from a family of artists, including her grandfather, the Cornish modernist painter Karl Weschke. She trained as an illustrator, and works primarily in pen and ink. Having lived with depression since childhood, a severe episode led her to being urgently referred for inpatient care.

As well as Severe Depressive Disorder, whilst undergoing treatment and therapy, Layla was newly diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, an extraordinarily insensitive label for a complex of interlinked symptoms: “significantly impaired functioning, including a feeling of emptiness, lack of identity, unstable mood and relationships, intense fear of abandonment and dangerous impulsive behaviour, including severe episodes of self-harm”.

Many of the drawings here are of a large series of floral deliveries for a woman who had been sectioned the week before her 50th birthday. Others were picked during walking therapy sessions through the gardens of the hospital, or cut from Layla’s wild garden hedgerow when she was able to return home. These drawings are thus not simply soft still-lives, but acidic sketches of these liminal floral stems, at once both markers of care and of illness.

Local flowers provided by The Flower Farm Denstroude are available to purchase – all profits donated to CALM.