Guest Speaker- Daniel Regan
In the afternoon of guest photographer speakers, Daniel Regan was the final person to talk to us about his projects and how his personal life has influenced everything he has done. Out of the three of them, he was the one that hit me emotionally the most because in some ways I can understand how he feels and I realised how much art can help a person recover emotionally. All of his work evolved around his mental health and wanting to bring light to the subject to make people realise how serious the subject is to the people it has affected. Daniel Regan is not only a photographer but and artistic director that focuses the health and wellbeing of life and has worked for a lot of charities and places that can all link in with each other. He has a BA in photography in which he completed in 2006 and has an MA in photography in which he graduated from London College of Communication in 2013 as well as being a volunteer for people in suicidal crisis for many years.
One of his first projects he worked on was called "Abandoned" in which was influenced on his own personal experiences about being hospitalised throughout the 2000's. He went around various Victorian mental asylums in the UK that had been left to decay and had left elements of the past which gives the audience a sense of pain and being abandoned as beds still remain standing, ragged clothes left scattered across the floor and broken furniture. What draws me into Regan's project is how you can clearly see every detailed section that still remains within the building and how paperwork of the patients have just been left on the floor in boxes.
One of my favourite projects in which Daniel spoke about was a series called "Fragmentary" in which was based around a body of work that used his medical records to make lined patterns across the images but he blacked out all, as he said himself, the juicy parts that everyone really wanted to know. He allowed the audience to see some of his personal life and his mental health but was able to choose which parts he wanted to uncover. The project worked with a health centre in Kentish Town as well as the Free Space Project which led him to create a website that allows artists to explore mental health and wellbeing in an online hub.
Daniel Regan's talk inspired me and helped me know that art can help to heal you and you give you a sense that things can be okay if you work towards it. I know that I will keep checking on his website to see what new projects he has worked on and if they all still link in with the theme of mental health and the wellbeing of life/the human condition, as well as seeing if there are anymore charities that he has worked with to help people in a similar situation.
