Examples of work – Shockheaded Peter

Shockheaded Peter

Shockheaded Peter is the collective title of, originally, ten short stories written and illustrated in 1845 by German physician, Heinrich Hoffmann. Each tale, essentially aimed at children, demonstrates the disastrous consequences of misbehaviour, Shockheaded Peter (or Slovenly Peter) being an example of subjective bullying due to his dishevelled appearance.

Born into a middle-class family and bourgeois society, Hoffmann was wholly expected to not ‘drown in the flood of daily common life’, essentially subjected to deny any unruly desires, curiosity and erotic inclinations, which is infiltrated into the stories. The children are being made to conform to parental ideals, and to suppress their imaginations, which, as a child, is fundamentally the only form of escapism.

The image of Peter (above) was design for a site-specific theatrical production, set in the morose depths of an old psychiatric hospital, of no particular time or location, where Dr Heinrich Hoffmann escorts the audience around the wards to ‘examine’ the patients. These patients are societies rejects – they have been ridiculed for their (marginally) erratic behaviour, subjected to a life of bullying, neglect and abandonment prior to being admitted, which all the children suffer from in the stories… However, the patients are not all children, they may be adults with neurological disorders, or they may believe that there is nothing erratic about their behaviour at all.

The concept is based around the ideas and ideals of freedom, and overruling parental and socio-governmental repression and conformity these individuals are having to endure, and inspired by the Rosenhan Experiment of the early 1970s, which questioned the validity of psychiatric diagnosis.

Shockheaded Peter, who within this concept, is a vagrant stroke patient suffering from Hemispatial Neglect – a neurological condition affecting one side of the brain resulting in a deficit in attention to the opposite side of space. Peter can only register things on his right hand side, therefore leaving the left side of his body completely neglected.

Using the metaphor of suppressed thought and motives in the character of Peter, I created a masked headdress (moulded leather, coloured/sprayed latex, moulded felt, punched acrylic hair) erupting into a mass of entangled hair and cogitation, rejoining the body into the back of the costume (in the form of a patient gown).