Audrey’s Afterlife
Evening Norland Square (1950s)
On 10 July 2013, Audrey Amiss worked on her latest scrapbook, sticking in the packaging of the food she had eaten that day. In her annotations she complained that the walk to and from the shops had left her exhausted. She did not write anything more and the TV guide was folded open at the page for that day. She was found dead in her home a few days later.
In ‘Intense Colours’ the blog he started when he and his sister realised that Audrey’s legacy was extraordinary, Steve wrote:
“Kate and I went to Auntie Audrey's house on 30 and 31 October 2013, a few months after she died in July. […] The house was dirty in some ways, but it had been abandoned for a while and there were no unwashed plates, just old food in the cupboards.”
Although the siblings knew the collection had aesthetic and cultural value, the sheer volume of work by a completely unknown artist presented a problem. It deserved attention they felt, but they had no idea how that might occur. They wrote about in the blog and made a video of a selection of the art.
There was no long-term solution in view until a chance meeting at the school drop-off led Kate to the door of Wellcome Trust, a large charitable foundation with interests in medicine and the arts. The timing was perfect. Doctors and other health professionals are well-represented in Wellcome’s collection, but the patient’s voice needed amplifying. Audrey’s archive exemplifies that change.
Two beds loaded with scrapbooks (2013)
Audrey’s own work among the pictures on the wall (2013)
In 2016, film director Carol Morley was awarded a fellowship to research in the Wellcome archive where she encountered Audrey’s work for the first time.
“I have found myself becoming very absorbed in her world - and I believe many others would too,” she wrote to Steve and Kate.
The result was Typist Artist Pirate King Carol’s road-movie which focused new attention on Audrey Amiss. The movie was shown at several film festivals and went on general release in 2023, later streaming on Netflix. It can be watched on the BFI player.
Wellcome catalogued the entire archive; applied science to the unusual challenges of preserving some very perishable materials; and began the huge task of digitising and making the archive available online.
In 2026, Audrey’s afterlife took a new turn with the opening of her first museum exhibition which re-created the shows Audrey had self-organised in her lifetime.
Tissue paper rose found in the house (2013)