This is a blog to store and record research and information relevant to the dissertation I will be writing next year as part of the final year of my degree in Drawing and Applied Arts.
Through my dissertation I want to explore the use of art as a therapy and how this is valued within our society.
The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space
At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an ‘outsider’ in many contexts - as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan’s most prominent contemporary artist.
Now 82, and resident by choice for the past 35 years in a psychiatric care home in her native Tokyo, Kusama is currently seeing all her wishes come true. Not only has she been granted this obsessive-compulsive 14-room retrospective by the Tate, one of her career-defining Infinity Net paintings sold for $5.1m in 2008, a record for a living female artist.
Success did not come easily. Born in patriarchal and deeply conservative Japan of the late 1920s, even the idea of becoming an artist, as a woman, must have taken a supreme effort of will. To become an artist quite as liberated from convention as Kusama must have felt a lot like the insanity she has always feared – and to some extent nurtured – in herself.
Her autobiography, Infinity Net, translated for this show, traces, with suitably dreamlike intensity, the web of influences that shaped her and her art. As a child, she claims to have experienced hallucinations, and nightmarish out of body experiences, which she subsequently attempted to describe in paranoid, vivid paintings alive with eyes and threatening organic forms, some of which, from the 1950s, make an alarming and expressive opening to the exhibition. She seems to have been drawn to surrealism, but given it a less playful, more psychologically unbalanced field, an edge perhaps explained by the fact that at the same age as she was seeing her visions, she was forced by her mother to spy on her father in bed with his string of mistresses and geishas. She developed a loathing of phallic images, and an overwhelming fascination with voyeurism.
Her response to these disturbing, formative forces seems twofold: she sought a kind of self-obliteration, covering herself and everything around her with her trademark polka dots – there is, among many other spotted surfaces, a fabulously spacey suburban living room here in which the edges of objects, sofas and tables are blurred by primary-coloured circular stickers, picked out in a psychedelic light. Elsewhere, mirrored "infinity rooms" take these points of colour into more dimensions than the eye can easily cope with. Almost nothing has been immune from Kusama's dottiness: horses and cats, buses and houses, trees and fields and rivers, she has camouflaged them all. Damien Hirst's outsourced efforts look decidedly spotty by comparison.
Alongside these identity-denying projects she also sought to overcome her phallic anxieties with a workaholic kind of aversion therapy. For a long period in middle age, she painstakingly stitched together apparently infinite numbers of "soft-sculpted" penises, which, her autobiography suggests, she found perverse solace in lying down among. These forms, made from stuffed surgical-looking cloth, grow out of chairs and lamps, shoes and bookshelves. In one celebrated instance, Kusama covered an entire rowing boat with them, oars and all; the boat is given a room of its own here, complete with the 999 reproductions of the image which paper walls, floor and ceiling. Elsewhere, the teeming, faceless sock puppets create cacti-like forests, run wild, and coming at you from all angles – again, the psycho-dramatists of contemporary British art, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, are made to seem somewhat lightweight in their neuroses.
Kusama arrived in America, having corresponded with Georgia O'Keeffe, in 1957. By the early 60s, she was exhibiting alongside Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, both of whom she seems to have influenced, with her manic exhibitionism as much as anything. The 60s in New York, the mix of underground promiscuity and hallucinogens, were waiting for her, in a way. She became a self-styled shaman, organising orgies and happenings in which hippies lost and found themselves by painting one another's nakedness with Kusama's polka dots until the NYPD arrived, to clear up the mess. The human dot-to-dot events were captured on films, which gained an arthouse following, and which are oddly compulsive viewing now as ethnographic documents – like those early films of the lost tribes of Papua New Guinea – evidence of another, hairier, time and place altogether.
Kusama was a curator of these events, never a participant, except with a pot of poster paint; still, she returned to Japan in the early 70s carrying some of their generally good-natured lunacy with her, and checked herself into an asylum, where she has lived as an ostentatious recluse ever since. In recent years she has returned to painting canvases; large, vibrantly coloured pictures which play with her recurring vocabulary of eyes and roots and wriggling spermatazoa-like forms, and which taken together have a borrowed aboriginal quality. She came over for the opening of this show, a rare public sighting, and sat in her polka-dotted wheelchair, in her polka-dotted dress in the midst of all this colour, looking like a child in the internal landscape of her own making, half magic roundabout, half Freudian case study. You wouldn't, you guess, want to live in this landscape full-time, but as a tourist destination, it certainly makes for a lively hour or so.
Emin places herself centre-stage in her work, telling intimate stories about her life. "It's like a cleansing of my soul. It's not just getting rid of baggage or carnage.
It's not that simple. Something actually happens within me.
"Being an artist isn't just about making nice things."
Other common name(s): creative arts therapy, expressive arts therapy
Scientific/medical name(s): none
Description
Art therapy is used to help people manage physical and emotional problems by using creative activities to express emotions. It provides a way for people to come to terms with emotional conflicts, increase self-awareness, and express unspoken and often unconscious concerns about their illness and their lives. “Expressive arts therapy” or “creative arts therapy” may also include the use of dance and movement, drama, poetry, and photo therapy, as well as more traditional art methods.
Overview
Many clinicians have observed and documented significant benefits among people who have used art therapy. Art therapy has not been studied scientifically to find out if it has value for people with cancer.
How is it promoted for use?
Art therapy is based on the idea that the creative act can be healing. According to practitioners, called art therapists, it helps people express hidden emotions; reduces stress, fear, and anxiety; and provides a sense of freedom. Many art therapists also believe the act of creation influences brain wave patterns and the chemicals released by the brain.
Art therapy has been used with bone marrow transplant patients, people with eating disorders, emotionally impaired young people, disabled people, the chronically ill, chemically addicted individuals, sexually abused adolescents, caregivers of cancer patients, and others. Art therapy may also be used to engage and distract patients whose illnesses or treatments cause pain.
Artwork may also be used as a diagnostic tool, particularly with children, who often have trouble talking about painful events or emotions. Art therapists say that often children can express difficult emotions or relay information about traumatic times in their lives more easily through drawings than through conventional therapy.
What does it involve?
People involved in art therapy are given the tools they need to produce paintings, drawings, sculptures, and many other types of artwork. Art therapists work with patients individually or in groups. The job of the art therapist is to help patients express themselves through their creations and to talk to patients about their emotions and concerns as they relate to their art. For example, an art therapist may encourage a person with cancer to create an image of themselves with cancer, and in this way express feelings about the disease that may be hard to talk about or may be unconscious.
In another form of art therapy, patients look at pieces of art, often in photographs, and then talk with a therapist about what they have seen. A caregiver or family member can also gather artwork in the form of photographs, books or prints, and give the patient a chance to look at and enjoy the art.
Many medical centers and hospitals include art therapy as part of inpatient care. It can be practiced in many other settings, such as schools, psychiatric centers, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, prisons, day care treatment programs, nursing homes, hospices, patients' homes, and art studios.
What is the history behind it?
The connection between art and mental health was first recognized in the late 1800s. In 1922, a book titled Artistry of the Mentally Ill aroused interest in the subject and caused the medical community to examine the diagnostic value of patients’ creations. Some practitioners realized that art might be valuable for rehabilitating patients with mental illness.
In the 1940s, ideas from psychoanalysis and art were combined to develop art as a tool to help patients release unconscious thoughts. Patients’ creations began to be considered as a type of symbolic speech. In 1958, at the National Institute of Mental Health, an artist named Hana Kwiatkowska translated her knowledge as an artist into the field of family work and introduced methods of evaluation and treatment techniques using art therapy.
In 1969, the American Art Therapy Association was established. The organization now has more than 4,500 members and, along with the Art Therapy Credentials Board, sets standards for art therapists and educates the public about the field. Registered art therapists must have graduate degree training and a background in studio arts and therapy techniques. More recently, several groups specializing in various kinds of art therapy, and expressive art therapies in general, have been established.
What is the evidence?
Numerous case studies have reported that art therapy benefits patients with both emotional and physical illnesses. Case studies have involved many areas, including burn recovery in adolescents and young children, eating disorders, emotional impairment in young children, reading performance, childhood grief, and sexual abuse in adolescents. Studies of adults using art therapy have included adults or families in bereavement, patients and family members dealing with addictions, and patients who have undergone bone marrow transplants, among others. Some of the potential uses of art therapy to be researched include reducing anxiety levels, improving recovery times, decreasing hospital stays, improving communication and social function, and pain control.
Are there any possible problems or complications?
Art therapy is considered safe when conducted by a skilled therapist. It may be useful as a complementary therapy to help people with cancer deal with their emotions. Although uncomfortable feelings may be stirred up at times, this is considered part of the healing process.
Relying on this type of treatment alone and avoiding or delaying conventional medical care for cancer may have serious health consequences.
Government advisers are expected to recommend art therapy on the NHS for people with schizophrenia.
The National Institute of Clinical and Health Excellence (NICE) will promote use of programmes offering music, art and dance therapy for the first time.
Activities include playing musical instruments and creating collages.
An expert panel found the therapy works particularly well in patients with "negative" symptoms such as withdrawal and poor motivation.
Schemes use trained therapists, with degrees in art, music or dance, and encourage people with schizophrenia to be creative as well as participating in group activities.
With psychoses, part of the problem is hallucinations and delusions and it becomes really hard to talk to people about them and people become isolated because no one is listening to them
Dr Mike Crawford, Imperial College London
Dr Tim Kendall, co-director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, who helped put together the draft guidance, said there are some arts therapists in place already but services are patchy.
"We have pulled together data from six different trials on several hundred people.
"Dance, art and music therapy all seem to have a positive benefit," he said.
"In Sheffield where I work it's available quite widely but some areas don't have the services."
Communication
NICE first issued guidance on schizophrenia in 2002 but has revisited the topic in light of new evidence.
A consultation on the new recommendations will be open until November, with final guidance due next year.
Dr Mike Crawford, an expert in mental health services at Imperial College London who has carried out studies on arts therapy, said the therapies help people communicate.
"With psychoses, part of the problem is hallucinations and delusions and it becomes really hard to talk to people about them - and people become isolated because no one is listening to them."
He added: "Although there is evidence these therapies work we don't really know how.
"It's possible they work because they just bring people together and break the cycle of isolation.
"Other people have argued it's helpful because you are constructing something."
Alison Cobb from the mental health charity Mind said: "While medication for schizophrenia can help tackle symptoms such as psychosis, medication alone fails to address some of the other problems people may experience, such as problems communicating and socialising with others.
"Art therapy is a non-threatening and accessible therapy that can help people express their feelings without the need to talk them over."
An art therapy project for people with mental health problems has been saved thanks to a grant of £65,000.
The Openart Studio in Darlington gives patients the chance to work with professional artists to help improve their mental wellbeing.
It was under threat of closure, but the funding from Durham Primary Care Trust means it can move into new premises when Darlington Arts Centre closes.
The project is run by the primary care trust and Darlington Council.
Darlington Arts Centre is due to shut in July.
A council spokesman said: "Unlike other schemes, people do not need to be referred by a medical professional to join Openart Studio - anyone aged over 18 who is interested in art and thinks they could benefit is welcome.
"The studio also welcomes carers, usually relatives or partners of people undergoing medical treatment, and runs special sessions for families and young people, as well as outreach sessions in the community."
Visiting artists offer a range of activities including drawing, painting, ceramics, textiles, photography and film.
Running throughout the year at The Bridge, Openart Studio is open to anyone with an interest, regardless of ability in exploring creative and artistic activities. We provide opportunities to learn and experiment with a range of materials and techniques with the help of professional artists and other studio members.
A joint partnership project, funded by PCT County Durham and Darlington Borough Council, Openart Studio aims for anyone living in Darlington:
Mood enhancement
Stress reduction
Relaxation
Social contact
Self esteem
Skills development
Structure of time
Confidence building.
Basically, anyone wanting to have fun, learn something new, make new friends and gain a skill should consider coming for a visit. Free of charge for the first eight weeks (including all materials and equipment), Openart Studio has something for everyone.
Analysing Louise Bourgeois: art, therapy and Freud
Louise Bourgeois was in therapy for more than 30 years and wrote an essay on 'Freud's Toys'. The Freud museum in London has a display of her work and recently unearthed writings about her analysis
Louise Bourgeois working on Sleep II in Italy, 1967. Photograph: Studio Fotografico, Carrara /The Easton Foundation
Above Freud's bulbous, oriental carpet-draped couch in 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, hangs a shrivelled, double-headed bronze penis by Louise Bourgeois. In an essay on "Freud's Toys" (1990), as Bourgeois dismissed the ancient artefacts that swarm over his desk and shelves (including numerous phallic amulets), she described Freud's cluttered office, with its "half-dead hysterics", as "a pitiful place". She also referred to Freud's patients as "maggots", which gives additional resonance to the placing of her suspended larval form. Analysis was, in her view, a form of metamorphosis, promising the transformation of seething misery into what Freud described as "common unhappiness"."A maggot," Bourgeois wrote, "is actually a symbol of resurrection."
Though she doesn't acknowledge it in her essay, Bourgeois had been in analysis herself for more than 30 years. In 1951, suffering from depression after her father's death, she entered therapy with Dr Leonard Cammer. The following year she switched to Dr Henry Lowenfeld, a second-generation Freudian who had emigrated to New York in 1938, the same year she did. Lowenfeld had been trained by the Marxist analyst Otto Fenichel in Berlin, where he was also a part of Wilhelm Reich's radical group, Sex-Pol. However, in New York, keen to assimilate to American culture and disenchanted with communism, Lowenfeld became part of the psychoanalytic mainstream and hid his radical past. At the height of the cold war he stole the incriminating Rundbriefe – letters written by Fenichel in the 1930s and circulated among their group of dissident analysts – from his colleague Annie Reich in an attempt to erase that history.
In 2007, just before Bourgeois's retrospective at Tate Modern, two boxes of discarded writings that refer to her analysis, which she underwent four times a week, were found in her Chelsea home; after her death in 2010 (aged 98), her assistant unearthed two more. Selections of these have been exhibited in the Freud museum alongside two dozen of her bulging and sinister patchwork sculptures and installations. These jottings, on random pads, letterheads, even playing cards, offer a glimpse into Bourgeois's psychological states. According to these notes, Lowenfeld considered the artist's inability to accept her aggression as the central problem to be worked through in analysis. "Aggression is used by guilt and turned against myself instead of being sublimated into useful channels," she wrote.
To art historians her free associations and doodles not only suggest clues as to the personal relationships and conflicts that inform all her work, but seem to offer direct links to her creative process (one Isis-like sketch is displayed here next to a similar multi-breasted sculpture, as fecund as the Venus of Willendorf). In an aborted letter to "Mon cher Papa", Bourgeois wrote: "In the 20th century the best work has been produced by those people whose exclusive concern was themselves." Her father was a tyrannical philanderer who had a 10-year affair with a live-in English governess, the discovery of which was the central trauma to which Bourgeois endlessly returned in her confessional work.
The recently discovered archive reveals the artist to have been an enthusiastic list-maker. In 1958, aged 47, Bourgeois compiled a melancholy account of her failures: "I have failed as a wife / as a woman / as a mother / as a hostess / as an artist / as a business woman", and so on. She made a suicidal list of "seven easy ways to end it all" (and throws in another for good measure). She listed her fears: "I am afraid of silence / I am afraid of the dark / I am afraid to fall down/ I am afraid of insomnia / I am afraid of emptiness …" And her feelings about analysis: "The analysis is a job / is a trap / is a privilege / is a luxury / is a duty … is a joke / makes me powerless / makes me into a cop / is a bad dream …"
Many of her automatic writings resemble concrete poetry, such as one arranged as a spiral of injunctions: "Do not risk too much / Do not hide too much / Do not neglect too much …" Others, written in cramped lines, are reminiscent of the webs of psychic "tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, [and] binds" that RD Laing formulates in Knots(1970). Bourgeois asked: "What is it that you want / do you know what it is / is it possible? no, why not / are you looking for a substitute. why? / which one?" On another loose leaf she wrote: "To be hurt / fear to be hurt / to hurt before you are hurt / what hurts?" (She answered her question by reverting to more list making: "to be abandoned / to be criticised / to be attached / to be asked too much / used / to be refused …")
These emotional inventories, with all their tangled logic, were Bourgeois's way of thinking, of working through. It was the art critic Peter Frank who encouraged her to jot down these free associations, not Lowenfeld: "It is not either my medicine nor my duty," she wrote in reference to Frank's suggestion; "I write because I have always felt that if people knew me really, they could not fail to like me. I write or make sculpture to be loved (for what I am)." Bourgeois admitted that this was a lost cause and was dismissive of their worth, suggesting that their meaning immediately evaporated, like Chinese calligraphy brushed on to stone with water: "Tout de mes notes seems remote + foreign except when in the process of being written, they communicate nothing not even to me."
Bourgeois considered art as her parallel "form of psychoanalysis", offering privileged and unique access to the unconscious, as well as a form of psychological release. On a piece of pink paper she scratched the slogan, "Art is a guarantee of sanity."Her artwork was reparative, a form of mental mending. Bourgeois's mother had been a tapestry restorer and Bourgeois often compared her to a spider spinning a fragile web; Maman (1999), Bourgeois's massive arachnid guarding an egg, is on display in the garden of the Freud museum (where Anna Freud's sizeable loom sits upstairs). In her textile pieces, the artist follows in her mother's footsteps by weaving, a craft that Freud, in one of his wilder hypotheses, thought had been invented by women as an unconscious product of "penis envy" (because the results imitate the hair that hides the genitals).
Bourgeois identified herself as a hysteric and made sculptures, like Arch of Hysteria (1993), that made reference to the "whirlpool of histeria" (sic) in which she often found herself consumed. In the Freud museum exhibition, the engraving that usually hangs above the famous couch – depicting Freud's mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, the "Napoleon of the neurosis", demonstrating hypnosis on a swooning hysterical patient – has been moved to an adjacent room, where it serves to introduce works by Bourgeois. In that context, the accompanying vitrines contain what looks like outsider art by an inmate of the Salpêtrière Hospital: magical objects with multiple faces; patchwork dolls with amputated limbs over which knives hover threateningly.
The artist was well-versed in psychoanalytic concepts, which informed and have often been used to help understand her work. She frequently annotated the psychoanalytic writings she read; on display here is her summary of a case history recounted in Werner Muensterberger's "The Creative Process: Its Relation to Object Loss and Fetishism" (1963). Muensterberger tells the story of a grieving woman who made a doll out of her late husband's dirty underclothes, a mannequin she tucked up next to her in bed, which evidently fascinated Bourgeois. Her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, to whom many of Bourgeois's notes refer (did he desire her anymore?), was the director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York and would have shared her interest in such fetish objects. Her own work was a similarly magical act aimed at exorcising trauma.
But, ultimately, Bourgeois felt that analysis had little to offer the artist. "The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist's problem, the artist's torment," Bourgeois wrote in "Freud's Toys", as if in frustration with the process to which she submitted for so many years, "to be an artist involves some suffering. That's why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure." Lowenfeld had died four years earlier, ending her analysis but evidently not her pain, which continued to fuel her work. In his essay "Dostoevesky and Parricide" (1926), Freud himself admitted: "Before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms."
The Freud Museum London is delighted to
announce an exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois. Louise
Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed will show
original documents from the artist’s recently discovered psychoanalytic
writings, as well as drawings and sculptures, in the house of the founding
father of psychoanalysis. Following its first showing in Latin America, the
exhibition has been re-imagined for the unique setting of the Freud Museum
London, which was discussed as a venue by Louise Bourgeois before her death.
Appropriately, in the final home of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud, this
exhibition will explore the artist’s complex and ambivalent engagement with the
theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and
lived in the United States from 1938 until her death in 2010. She became one of
the best known artists of the 20th century, whose work has inspired a rich
commentary from academics and critics alike. What is not generally known is
that she also undertook a psychoanalysis spanning three decades. The exhibition
is based on the discovery of two boxes of writings by her longtime assistant
Jerry Gorovoy at the beginning of 2004, and two more in early 2010. These
constitute an archive of over one thousand loose sheets recording her reactions
to her psychoanalytic treatment from 1951; several texts refer directly to Dr.
Henry Lowenfeld, whom she saw from 1952 to 1982. In some cases these texts
complement existing diaries that she kept throughout her life, while in others
they serve to fill in the gaps for those years in which she did not keep a diary.
The exhibition will raise fundamental
questions about the relationship between art and life, and the therapeutic
nature of art itself. To curator Larratt-Smith, who has served as the literary
archivist of the Louise Bourgeois Archives since 2002: ‘The discovery of the
psychoanalytic writings has enriched and augmented our understanding of
Bourgeois’s work and life immeasurably. They represent a distinct contribution
to art history as well as to the field of psychoanalysis.’ The exhibition
foregrounds the importance of these writings, displaying nearly fifty original
manuscripts for the first time and ranging from sketches, notes, dream
recordings, lists and drawings.
Sculptures and drawings on display will
include pieces such as The Dangerous Obsession (2003),
the woven fabric text I Am Afraid (2009),
and drawings and four gouache on paper works from the 2007 series The Feeding. Janus
Fleuri (1968), sometimes considered the most significant of
all Bourgeois’s works, will also come into Freud’s home.
Chris Yianni supported by the charity Kids Company, working on his as yet untitled artwork for the Royal Academy. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Gently folding back the torn edges of the child's T-shirt so that the ripped and bloody heart can be seen more easily, Chris Yianni frowns down at his toddler-sized, papier-mache artwork.
"Imagine the damage a drunken man could do to this model if he really let fly," he says. "There wouldn't be much left of it, would there? My dad used to attack me when I was this size."
Yianni's mannequin is just one of the 1,000 paintings, soundscapes and sculptures by children and young adults to be showcased at the Royal Academy's groundbreaking new exhibition Child Hood – the Real Event.
In a unique collaboration, the RA has given the charity Kids Company, which supports 17,000 severely traumatised children every year, free use of five galleries in its building in Burlington Gardens, London, from 13 June until the end of the Olympics.
It is the first time the gallery has dedicated serious space to the art of children. But, says Beth Schneider, head of learning at the Academy, the art they have produced is outstanding.
"The way these children have worked their experiences through into art is not only incredibly moving and sometimes quite shocking but it is amazingly skilled," she says. "Their honesty and openness is really inspiring."
The art lays bare the preoccupations of children for whom abuse and trauma is an everyday occurrence. These children are not worried by monsters under the bed. Instead, their artworks show visceral fears of being shot, stabbed and raped; of being homeless and hungry.
One film features a pack of terrified children running through labyrinthine council estates, unable to escape. Another work has a gaping child-shaped hole in the centre. "The five-year-old girl who made this, tore out the model of herself at the last minute," says the charity's founderCamila Batmanghelidjh. "She wanted to send it to her father, who is in prison."
Yianni's mannequin has a knife in its chest thrust almost to the hilt. Seven flags hang from its blade, reading: parents, social services, carers, school, prison service, society, criminal justice system.
"The services whose responsibility it was to protect me, ignored me when I was abused then punished me, because when I escaped I had to live on the streets and railways; stealing and robbing to feed myself and survive," he says.
Yianni ran away from home the first time when he was eight. "I used to be gone for weeks at a time, drinking and smoking cannabis to stop myself going completely crazy. No one asked why a little kid was behaving in this way. Each time I was caught by the police or social services, I was just taken back home, where the abuse got worse. When I was old enough, they sent me to young offender institutions. Then to adult prisons."
Between the ages of 14 and 26, Yianni spent seven Christmasses behind bars. Two months ago, Kids Company wrote to the judge about to send him to prison yet again. "I begged the judge to let me try it my way," says Batmanghelidjh.
Kids Company paid for Yianni to go to a private hospital, where he was diagnosed with severe and multiple trauma, and put on anti-seizure medication to regulate his moods. The charity now pays for his weekly counselling sessions and for a small flat in the countryside.
For the first time in his life, Yianni is off drugs, has a home and, although he still suffers night terrors, can usually get back to sleep after waking up in the early hours, shrieking and crying with fear.
An independent evaluation by the University of London over three years found Kids Company provides "an outstanding service" to its children, about 85% of whom are homeless, have emotional and psychiatric disorders, are multiply traumatised, or are addicted to substances. The charity's 88% impact on crime reduction and 97% "effectiveness" rating has much to do with its focus on arts as part of the children's recovery, says Batmanghelidjh.
"Art unfreezes trauma from a state of explosive potency," she adds. "The children's artistic work tends to be aggressive and compulsive but it's very powerful and uplifting, too.
"They have so much poetry, these children, because they have seen the worst of humanity. When they re-engage with life, they have deep insight that is absolutely extraordinary."
Over the past four years, the academy has worked alongside the charity's 15 arts psychotherapists to help children exorcise their traumas through creativity. Working with such traumatised children is not an easy task, says Batmanghelidjh. Their work can be deeply disturbing; their lack of self-worth means they often try to destroy whatever they create.
In Looking for Alleycat, a girl who lived on the streets from age 12 to 18 creates a nightmarish maze of places she used to sleep. Fragments of herself are scattered in railway stations, crack dens and garbage cans.
But Alleycat, as she was known when she lived on the street, is one of the charity's many positive stories. Despite having barely been to school since she was 10, she was recently given an unconditional place to study English at university.
Another severely abused teenager has won a place on the Royal Court'screative writing programme. Another has designed a "baby hoodie", now on sale at Liberty's department store in London.
Yianni is partly awed that his work will be exhibited in the Royal Academy – and partly furious. "The people who run the academy and the people who visit it are the ones who need to be woken up to the truth of childhood in the UK," he says.
"They have invited us in and I'm grateful for that, but it's a very different thing to listen to what we're saying – and then do something about it."
"A lot of the kids I grew up with are dead now but there are others going through exactly what I did," he adds. "They're living lives of absolute hell. They don't just desperately need help, they deserve it, too."
With psychoses, part of the problem is hallucinations and delusions and it becomes really hard to talk to people about them and people become isolated because no one is listening to them 
