John Keats Returns to The Old Operating Theatre

A 'conversation' with John Keats​

​My 'conversation' with Keats began in 2019 when a friend gave me a time worn edition of Palgraves Treasury. The poetry book was in poor condition with a loose binding and having lost its cover. I started a series of drawings across the pages and in doing so found myself returning to the poems of John Keats. The following year in early 2020, while visiting  The Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret with fellow Bookscapes artists, I was surprised to find myself once more in the company of Keats.

A display informed me Keats had studied as an apothecary surgeon and completed some of his training at St Thomas Hospital. The Herb Garret had once been a part of the original hospital. Having provisionally agreed with the museum to create a group exhibition, everything was postponed as the UK went into lockdown.
 ​

Throughout that summer, I continued to read about Keats. His life and words resonated with my own circumstances. We were dealing with an extended lockdown, while also adjusting to a series of significant losses. I found solace in Keats words and experiences - in particular his use of poetry to navigate the hardships of life. 

​His medical training under the famous surgeon Astley Cooper, had emphasised the importance of observation and experience. This approach greatly influenced his outlook and thoughts on the nature of suffering - of which he had  witnessed much as a doctor and also experienced at a personal level. 

Keats expressed the idea that physical and mental pain could sharpen the senses, and that this could also allow you to appreciate beauty and that in turn, beauty could evoke a strong emotional response in the beholder. As one of the Romantic poets, he accentuated extreme emotion through descriptions of natural imagery. 

---

In Keats Medical Notebooks, Hrileena Ghosh describes this beautifully;  
​
"Keats had a tendency to concentrate and contrast uncertain, in between regions that straddle past and present, humanity and divinity, life and death, health and sickness, dreaming and waking.
Thresholds are liminal spaces characterised by mutability and transience. Keats poetry is especially alive to this vitality of the threatened. Anything subject to change is also subject to time. Keats frequently employs compassion to manipulate the effects of temporality. Compassion allowed Keats to highlight such contrasts and focus attention on the life and beauty that exists in the shadow of death."

This work began as 'a conversation' using Keats words alongside found text through a process of redaction. The voice of Keats emerges and dissolves through these two volumes. Observations of his surroundings and the natural world become clear alongside an acknowledgement of the of presence of death while also holding on to hope. It is an ongoing project. 

Above image shows the work on display at The Old Operating Theatre.