Incarcerated

Entry to all of exhibitions was free, and in total over ten thousand people visited; four thousand to the MAC exhibition alone. Alongside the MAC exhibition, a policy-focused conference was also held at MAC in February 2024, resulting in the Making Proper Use of ‘Proper Prisons’? policy briefing published with the Howard League for Penal Reform, and featuring some of the art work and photography. Also alongside the exhibition, on 13 Jan 2024 MAC hosted a free ‘in conversation’ session in which photographer Andy Aitchison and Dean Kelland, Artist-in-Residence at HMP Grendon, discussed their creative practice with Dominique Moran.

Feedback from visitors to the MAC demonstrated that the exhibition had prompted them to consider in a different way the people whose lives were led within these institutions, and to question the future both of prisons in general, and of Victorian-era prisons in particular. For example:

The exhibition moved me to really consider, in a fully imagined way, the ‘inner’ lives of people incarcerated in the Victorian prison estate. It also made me understand how complex the question of prison reform really is: in some ways the Victorian prisons are the worst spaces imaginable to hold human beings in custody – dirty, oppressive, haunted by the past; but in other ways these institutions & buildings mean something, and even create a sense of community, both in the present and between the present and the past.

and

The exhibition humanised prisoners, and made me think differently about prisoners.

Recognising that incarcerated people would not see their own work on display, the MAC exhibition was extensively covered in ‘Inside Time’, the newspaper for incarcerated people in the UK, a set of photography of the exhibition was bound into a book, a copy of which was placed in the library at each case study prison, and at the end of the exhibition period the framed artworks, and the text and photography panels were returned for exhibition within the two prisons.