Where Am I? Livewell’s Lawrence Badman-Richards exhibits at The Box Plymouth
As well as being one of our practice teachers in Adult Social Care, teaching, supervising and assessing students and newly qualified social workers in Livewell, Lawrence Badman-Richard is also a very talented artist.
Lawrence took up painting more than 20 years ago under the pseudonym ‘Arth Lawr’, and has held successful exhibitions in the Royal William Yard in Plymouth as well as having had an elephant featured in Plymouth’s Elmer Parade in 2019.
This LGBT+ History Month, we caught up with Lawrence to talk about his involvement in an upcoming exhibition at The Box Plymouth, ‘Where Am I?’ which uses items from their archive to explore the lived experiences of different communities.
Lawrence said: “Around a year ago, The Box approached myself and a group of other artists in Plymouth to invite us to be part of this exhibition.
“We were given access to their archives, which was fascinating, and were able to choose pieces and look at them through the lens of what we know today about being LGBT+ and what that said about some of the pieces in The Box’s collection.
“I chose a piece by an artist called Christopher Wood, who was linked to the Bloomsbury set in the 1920s as well as being friends with Pablo Picasso. Christopher was addicted to opium and died by suicide at the age of 27. What we know today is that Christopher was bisexual.
“For the exhibition I’ve provided a contemporary commentary examining whether Christopher’s sexuality influenced his life and death, picking out some of the details of his paintings that led me to believe certain things.
“Even though he was a member of the Bloomsbury set where sexual identity was quite fluid, most of society viewed it differently. If he was caught having a relationship with another man, he could have been put in prison, so did that type of permanent fear, hyper vigilance and constant microaggressions around his identity contribute towards his drug addiction? Was his death partly driven by the fact that he couldn’t accept his identity?
“Other artists have done similar things with other pieces of art from The Box’s collection, and then what we’ve also done is ask, ‘so, where am I? Where would we be in the current collection?’ and have come up with our own exhibit that highlights contemporary LGBT+ history in Plymouth – as part of that, the T-shirt that I used to wear clubbing is now a part of the exhibition, and other artists have given their own artefacts to the archive to make it more representative of Plymouth.
“And this is only the first chapter in The Box’s work. While LGBT+ history has kicked off the work, they will also be looking at exploring the experiences of different communities.
“The exhibition has been fascinating to be a part of; The Box has some exceptional items and being in the archive felt a bit like being in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The treasures we’ve been able to see and handle!”
The ‘Where Am I?’ exhibition opens at The Box Plymouth on 19 March 2022 and runs until 23 June 2022 – click here for more information.
