From a Mark Adams photo of a Sunnyside patient

In 1968, Tony Fomison’s good friend Mark Adams photographed a patient at Sunnyside, a Christchurch psychiatric hospital. In this work, Fomison paints her against a landscape like that in the Mona Lisa – likening the so-called ‘madwoman’ to one of art history’s most famous faces.

Fomison had himself spent time in a psychiatric asylum while recovering from a drug overdose in London in 1968. He grew suspicious of how psychiatry defined people as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ – to him, mental illness was an alternative, rather than abnormal, state of mind.

– Dr Chelsea Nichols, 2018