Laundry number 583, Agnes sews and sews.

49 years old, she writes her life in thread, pieces of wool, linen, pricked with German script:

“I am not big, I wish to read, I plunge headlong into disaster.” Faster, faster, life in a psychiatric hospital, the days are not lost, they’re lived, every second, every minute, every hour.

Mary, suffering mania, cutting strips of cloth, pieces of cotton, linen, starbursts, letters, crosses, geometric patterns, spreading them on the floor, connecting, disconnecting,

feet stepping over, across, creating a dance out of air. “I am not big, I wish to read, I plunge headlong into disaster.” Faster, faster, life in a psychiatric hospital, the days are not lost, they’re lived, every second, every minute, every hour.

A reordering of the space, they say, the not insane, visual transformation, investing it with an inscrutable significance only the sick can see. But they take pictures, they take notes, 

outsider art, a combination of decoration and communication. Everyone puts on their white coat and hmms and wonders and nods, the wool, the cotton, the linen. It’s beautiful, so you see nothing else (not the dull, stucco-crumbled rooms, the concrete floors, the bars, the locked boarded-up doors, the rusted bathtubs, water on the ground, blood, fingernail gouges). Beautiful starbursts, letters, crosses, geometric patterns, pricked with German script: “I am not big, I wish to read, I plunge headlong into disaster,” collected in the art of the insane, the outsiders, listed by malady with no names.

Agnes sews, Mary cuts, faster, faster, life in a psychiatric hospital, “I plunge headlong while the men in coats look on.” The days are not lost, they’re lived, every second, every minute, every hour.

Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Arts. She lives in Graham, NC with her cats James Cagney and Janis Joplin.

A Song for Kate