Manchester-based interdisciplinary artist Chloe Watts has spent nearly a decade building a self-devised creative practice in the absence of the lawful aftercare she was entitled to following three years of psychiatric hospitalisation. This is what that practice looks like.
On 23 February 2017, Chloe Watts was discharged from hospital after three years as an inpatient. She was entitled, under Section 117 of the Mental Health Act 1983, to aftercare: structured support to help her navigate the transition back into life outside institutional systems. That support was not provided. It has continued to be denied. What she built in its absence is the body of work presented here.
Watts enrolled in art education in September 2017, beginning what would become two foundations, a BA in Illustration with Animation at Manchester School of Art, an MA in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art and a Diploma in Mosaic Studies at the London School of Mosaic. She describes this education as “almost a retaliatory voluntary institutionalisation,” a way of reclaiming life on her own terms by inserting herself into creative and academic communities that could provide, however informally, the structure and space that statutory services had failed to offer. It was self-curated support. It was also, gradually, a practice.
That practice evolved organically, not always in direct conversation with her mental health, until a relapse during her BA brought her back to the necessity of it. She found herself without a framework for navigating illness outside institutional systems and responded by making: a body of work called My Messy Brain that documented five months in her mind through painting. “The act of sitting down and painting allowed my body a much needed break,” she says. She began to get better.
The works that followed have ranged widely in form and material. Ode to My Body is a life-size figure in vitreous mosaic, exploring her relationship to her own body. I am Okay is a typewritten sheet of paper, one “I am okay” for every day she spent in hospital, typed in a single sitting so that the repetition and the strain on her hands felt symbolic. She made it, she explains, out of frustration that the records of her admissions are fragmented, that services repeatedly fail to see her full history, that she is made to prove, again and again, that she was there. Self Prescription is a prescription label rendered in vitreous glass paint on stained glass, made in response to her psychiatric medication going unreviewed and no one willing to take responsibility for her care. Old Unhappy Far Off Times visualises the hazy, incomplete visual memories of hospital through risograph and notes app, the attempt of a visual thinker to draw what she cannot fully picture.
The notes app also provides the works’ most intimate material. Two lines that appear in Watts’ own notes capture something essential: “I had a dream last night I got readmitted to hospital and had to give up my studio and my cat.” And: “Sometimes I want to tell my brain to read the room. The room is saying shut up.” Both arrive with the flatness and precision of someone who has spent years learning to observe herself clearly, without sentimentality, without drama, with a kind of dark humour that is its own form of resilience.
Watts is now framing her practice as a research chronology of self-devised care, with hopes to pursue a PhD in art and philosophy to generate new knowledge in the areas of lived experience and self-care. She is speaking publicly about her situation, she says, because the Mental Health Act exists to protect vulnerable people, and many of those affected by its failures cannot advocate for themselves. Her practice has been shaped by conditions beyond her control. She has made it into something that speaks for more than itself.
Chloe Watts is an interdisciplinary artist based in Manchester. Her practice moves across image-making, textual works and material experimentation, shaped by her lived experiences and an ongoing commitment to systemic change.
ARTIST LINKS
aftercare.myportfolio.com
chloeyas.art
@chloeyasart
chloeyasart.bigcartel.com
Works include: Ode to My Body (2025), vitreous mosaic on plywood; The Institutionalised (2023), ink on paper, printed on newsprint; Old Unhappy Far Off Times (2025), risograph and notes app; I am Okay (2025), typewriter on office paper; Self Prescription (2024), vitreous glass paint on stained glass.
