Archiving Audrey Amiss

Audrey Amiss compiled over 200 scrapbooks throughout her life. They contained her daily thoughts and experiences, and a range of food packaging, receipts, sketches and photographs, accompanied by copious handwritten notes. How do you describe such an abundant collection within an archive? How do you preserve an individual voice within an institutional record? In this film, archivist Elena Carter reveals how she approached cataloguing Audrey’s extraordinary body of work.
This short film is part of Finding Audrey Amiss
Living in and out of psychiatric hospitals, the artist Audrey Amiss documented her everyday life in a striking visual diary. When she died, her family donated her archive of hundreds of scrapbooks, sketchbooks and notebooks to Wellcome Collection. In this series, archivist Elena Carter writes about cataloguing and caring for the collection to understand the artist’s life, which is also the subject of the feature film ‘Typist Artist Pirate King’, directed by Wellcome Screenwriting Fellow Carol Morley.
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