Audrey Amiss

Audrey Joan Amiss (1933 – 2013) was a British artist, whose art was re-discovered and recognised after her death in 2013. During her lifetime, Amiss was not well known as an artist and spent large periods of her life in psychiatric hospitals and units, often against her will and following arrest for civil disturbance. A feature film inspired by Amiss' life, Typist Artist Pirate King, was written and directed by Carol Morley, and had its UK premiere in March 2023 at Glasgow Film Festival.

Art Audrey Amiss formally trained as an artist, studying at the Royal Academy between 1954 and 1958. While she did not complete her art training due to mental illness, Amiss continued to create art throughout her life.

Amiss' art "allows a bewildering glimpse into the life of a woman wholly preoccupied with artmaking, collecting, and recording." Amiss was prolific in her artistic output, and is known to have created hundreds of sketches, paintings and other artworks over the course of her life. Much of this work was not seen publicly; while Amiss entered her work for submission in exhibitions and prizes or showed work at open exhibitions, she often expressed frustration at the formal art scene and her lack of recognition as an artist. On having an artwork rejected by an art society, Amiss wrote to her sister: 'I was once in the tradition of social realism, also called the kitchen sink school of painting. But I am now avant-garde and misunderstood.'

Amiss described her work as "a visual diary", and her drawings and paintings took their subject matter from the world around her, including still life, landscapes, local scenes, portraits, figures and objects. Each of these series of volumes was used for a defined purpose, from recording summaries of letters sent (record books), money spent and received (account books), log books (diary-type daily entries), and scrapbooks and photo albums (food eaten, junk mail and collected ephemera). The style of Amiss' art varies, with earlier works favouring more naturalistic renditions and use of oil, gouache, and pastels, whereas later works are more abstract and gestural, and tend to use pencil or pen, as well as block colour compositions in paint. Earlier portfolio works show Amiss experimenting with texture and architecture studies, different styles and techniques, and print-making.

Amiss also created compositional works using found material such as junk mail, food packaging and newspaper cuttings, which were pasted into scrapbooks.

Personal life Amiss was born and grew up in Sunderland with her parents, Arthur and Isabelle (Belle) and sister, Dorothy. As a child, Amiss attended Bede Grammar School for Girls, where teachers noticed her artistic capabilities. After school, Amiss went on to attend the Sunderland College of Art, before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy School of Art in London in 1954. Amiss studied painting at the Royal Academy, but withdrew from her studies in 1958, following what she described as her first breakdown with manic depression and incarceration at Warlingham Park Hospital.

Amiss was a keen traveller, and went on numerous holidays abroad, both as a solo traveller on package holidays or with her mother. These included holidays to Syria, South America, Russia, Egypt, India and Nepal, Vietnam and China. When visiting China in the 1980s, Amiss was restrained and arrested, returned to England and sectioned at Tooting Bec Hospital. 234 volumes of photograph albums and scrapbooks were found in Amiss' home dating from 1977 to 2013. The sketchbooks alone contain an estimated 50,000 individual sketches, with Amiss often filling entire volumes in one sitting or over the course of a single day. Amiss' time in hospitals was often the result of altercations in public and involved police arrests for civil disturbance.

Amiss described herself as a Mental Health Survivor and was involved with local mental health groups and survivor networks. She wrote frequent letters about her sense of mistreatment in hospitals, and her distrust of medical institutions and doctors.

Legacy and popular culture During her lifetime, Amiss organised at least six solo exhibitions and participated in many group shows, including the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibitions in the 1950s. In July 2026, Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions, opened at Wellcome Collection. Based on extensive research in Wellcome's Audrey Amiss archive, it reconstructed her six known shows as completely as possible.

Audrey Amiss' life is the subject of a feature-length film, Typist Artist Pirate King, written and directed by BAFTA-nominated film maker Carol Morley and produced by Cairo Cannon, which was filmed in November 2021. The film imagines a road trip of Amiss and a psychiatric nurse. The film was made following Carol Morley's time as a Screenwriting Fellow at Wellcome Trust from 2015, where she encountered Amiss' archive and undertook research to develop the film. The film had its international premiere at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2022, and had its UK Premiere at Glasgow Film Festival in March 2023.

Archive and art collection

Audrey Amiss' archive and artworks were donated by her family to Wellcome Collection in 2014. The archive has the archive reference PP/AMI. The collection is freely available for all library members at Wellcome Collection to view onsite in the Collection's library.