Naming the Orphans interweaves creative non-fiction, archive footage and interviews with field recordings and music composed from vocal and instrumental responses to The Adamson Collection; works created in the UK’s first art therapy group, by individuals compelled to live at Netherne asylum during the mid-20th Century.
Employing radio’s singular ability to invoke present and past simultaneously, it is equal parts poem, soundscape and documentary. The narrator’s identity mutates, timestreams interpolate, converging and diverging through a drawing of a house, surfacing a lost and found visual collection through audio collage and transmissions from the static of a history riddled with lacunae.

Naming The Orphans

A radio slips between stations. From static, a voice emerges, reading an elliptical, fragmentary text, interpolated with birdsong, improvised music and sounds of private acts performed in public spaces. The performed text is from a copy of Institutional and Schizophrenia: A Comparative Study of Three Mental Hospitals 1960-68.   The medical/authoritative voice has been erased using Tippex, leaving a poetic, Beckettian remainder which gradually coalesces into a description of the collective experience of those who were compelled to live long-term at Netherne hospital and an emotional, evocative exploration of power structures, dailiness and creativity in the experimental art therapy studio there. Rose Ruane is an artist and writer, living and working in Glasgow. Her debut novel This Is Yesterday was published by Corsair books, with a second to follow in summer 2024. She has made radio work for Radio Scotland, Radio 3 and Radiophrenia and is currently finishing a SGSAH funded PhD at Glasgow University exploring The Adamson Collection: work created during the C20th, in the art therapy studio at Netherne mental hospital, by individuals who were compelled to live there. Wing of Glass was created in collaboration with a sound artist working under the name Local Teenagers.

Naming The Orphans

Rose Ruane

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