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The Weight of Being: Vulnerability, Resilience and Mental Health in Art
Free exhibition to 19 April 2026
Two Temple Place, London
“Life is hard, that’s why no one survives” is the title of a work by Middlesborough-born artist Gordon Dalton.
Ultimately, even art is not a cure, but it can console, give meaning and even extend our lives. It’s true for us all to varying degrees. It’s especially true for some of the artists featured in the latest exhibition at Two Temple Place for whom “the weight of being” is heavy indeed.
Dalton’s multi-coloured work is also humorous and, relatively speaking, cheerful as well as melancholic.
Like many of the works in this exhibition, which continues the vocation of Two Temple Place as a London showcase for works from publicly owned collections around the UK, it is rooted in the harsh, industrial north, where factories belch smoke and leisure is crammed into days at the fairground and snatches of countryside.
The exhibition also provides a focal point for the venue’s 2026 cultural and community programme to engage with mental health. The artists featured grapple with clinical issues including depression, dyslexia, cerebral palsy and social issues, such as finding purpose in a post-industrial age.
Scattered throughout are works by John Wilson McCracken, who trained at the Slade School of Art in London, but left after mental health problems and then spent much of his life in Hartlepool.
A consistent theme of his wide-ranging art is empathy with the worker, whether an artist, such as his friend Lucian Freud, depicted sleeping and yet somehow not at rest, or a woman, with muscles that are testimony to her impassive labour, cleaning a café table.
Work is what gives purpose and keeps us sane. It also enslaves and drives us mad.
The photographs of former nurse Johannah Churchill depict the exhaustion and trauma of the nurses who worked through the pandemic.
Coal miner turned artist Tom McGuinness in “The Hewer” portrays a miner, skeletal and luminous in the darkness of underground, sitting on a tiny perch, we’re told is called a crocket.
The more modern workplace is less obviously dangerous, but still fraught.
Peter Butler’s horribly grey “Office 1977” evokes what we’re told, and probably heartily agree is “the oppression of open plan”.
Another study in grey is “Whitstable in Charcoal”, a monochrome depiction of sea and sky that merge with each other, and for artist Liz Atkin, represent relief: painting and drawing are a way to tackle her condition of dermatillomania, or the compulsion to pick one’s skin off.
Lucy Jones, who was born with cerebral palsy and dyslexia, also works through the pain.
“Every single brush stroke I have to fight for,” she has declared. Her “Being 66, Being” naked self-portrait in metallic paint is proud and defiant.
As a gay, South African Jew, Sir Anthony Sher had much to conceal when he came to England in the late sixties. He channelled his anxieties into not just acting, but writing and painting.
He paints himself as Primo, the role he played in his one-man show adaptation of Primo Levi’s novel of the Holocaust: “If This is A Man”. The frame is dominated by gloomy swirls, while “Primo” shrinks into a corner.
No exploration of modern trauma would be complete without tackling gender dysphoria.
Artist Lizzie Rowe was Stephen until she underwent a sex change in 1996 that was documented by Channel 4. She died in December 2023, leaving a legacy of paintings, including “Conundrum Triptych”. At the centre of it, Rowe, wearing a frilled skirt, gazes into the mirror before her, her hands tied behind her back, entrapping her.
Art alleviates, while making us share the weightiness of it all. For those who still crave some lightness of being, Barbara Long’s serious feminist point is made in jest as she turns an old duster, symbolic of typically female drudgery, into the stitched protest: “Let us play”.
As a neo-Tudor mansion built to house the offices of real-estate heir William Waldorf Astor, Two Temple Place could seem an unlikely setting for the art of suffering, endurance and human resilience.
And yet, it is entirely in keeping with the mission of current owner the Bulldog Trust charity that creates opportunities for those without them and provides a wealth of art that is free to all.
The Weight of Being: Vulnerability, Resilience and Mental Health in Art
Free exhibition to 19 April 2026
Two Temple Place, London
“Life is hard, that’s why no one survives” is the title of a work by Middlesborough-born artist Gordon Dalton.
Ultimately, even art is not a cure, but it can console, give meaning and even extend our lives. It’s true for us all to varying degrees. It’s especially true for some of the artists featured in the latest exhibition at Two Temple Place for whom “the weight of being” is heavy indeed.
Dalton’s multi-coloured work is also humorous and, relatively speaking, cheerful as well as melancholic.
Like many of the works in this exhibition, which continues the vocation of Two Temple Place as a London showcase for works from publicly owned collections around the UK, it is rooted in the harsh, industrial north, where factories belch smoke and leisure is crammed into days at the fairground and snatches of countryside.
The exhibition also provides a focal point for the venue’s 2026 cultural and community programme to engage with mental health. The artists featured grapple with clinical issues including depression, dyslexia, cerebral palsy and social issues, such as finding purpose in a post-industrial age.
Scattered throughout are works by John Wilson McCracken, who trained at the Slade School of Art in London, but left after mental health problems and then spent much of his life in Hartlepool.
A consistent theme of his wide-ranging art is empathy with the worker, whether an artist, such as his friend Lucian Freud, depicted sleeping and yet somehow not at rest, or a woman, with muscles that are testimony to her impassive labour, cleaning a café table.
Work is what gives purpose and keeps us sane. It also enslaves and drives us mad.
The photographs of former nurse Johannah Churchill depict the exhaustion and trauma of the nurses who worked through the pandemic.
Coal miner turned artist Tom McGuinness in “The Hewer” portrays a miner, skeletal and luminous in the darkness of underground, sitting on a tiny perch, we’re told is called a crocket.
The more modern workplace is less obviously dangerous, but still fraught.
Peter Butler’s horribly grey “Office 1977” evokes what we’re told, and probably heartily agree is “the oppression of open plan”.
Another study in grey is “Whitstable in Charcoal”, a monochrome depiction of sea and sky that merge with each other, and for artist Liz Atkin, represent relief: painting and drawing are a way to tackle her condition of dermatillomania, or the compulsion to pick one’s skin off.
Lucy Jones, who was born with cerebral palsy and dyslexia, also works through the pain.
“Every single brush stroke I have to fight for,” she has declared. Her “Being 66, Being” naked self-portrait in metallic paint is proud and defiant.
As a gay, South African Jew, Sir Anthony Sher had much to conceal when he came to England in the late sixties. He channelled his anxieties into not just acting, but writing and painting.
He paints himself as Primo, the role he played in his one-man show adaptation of Primo Levi’s novel of the Holocaust: “If This is A Man”. The frame is dominated by gloomy swirls, while “Primo” shrinks into a corner.
No exploration of modern trauma would be complete without tackling gender dysphoria.
Artist Lizzie Rowe was Stephen until she underwent a sex change in 1996 that was documented by Channel 4. She died in December 2023, leaving a legacy of paintings, including “Conundrum Triptych”. At the centre of it, Rowe, wearing a frilled skirt, gazes into the mirror before her, her hands tied behind her back, entrapping her.
Art alleviates, while making us share the weightiness of it all. For those who still crave some lightness of being, Barbara Long’s serious feminist point is made in jest as she turns an old duster, symbolic of typically female drudgery, into the stitched protest: “Let us play”.
As a neo-Tudor mansion built to house the offices of real-estate heir William Waldorf Astor, Two Temple Place could seem an unlikely setting for the art of suffering, endurance and human resilience.
And yet, it is entirely in keeping with the mission of current owner the Bulldog Trust charity that creates opportunities for those without them and provides a wealth of art that is free to all.
Barbara Lewis © 2026.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, art, exhibitions, painting, photography • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, drawing, exhibitions, painting, photography