Sefer Charles became a heroin addict at 27 after her father died. It took another terrible experience to force her to change her life.
“Ten years ago I had a child who was born with kabuki syndrome, she was born dying. The fact that she needed me made me realise I had a life, I had to be grateful for it and I had to do something,” she says.
Sefer, now 49, found the road to rehabilitation in art.
“About this time I started writing poems. The first was an exploration of my recovery and exactly what I’d been doing to myself, focusing on my self-destruction and the love and time I needed to get out of it. I cried when I read it. That really began my healing.”
Sefer’s poem is currently being displayed in an exhibition of artwork, Expressions of Recovery, produced by recovering drug addicts. On show at the Our Space Gallery on Old Street, owned by the Islington-based mental health charity, Together, the exhibition was organised by Cranstoun, a drugs and alcohol recovery support charity.
Sophie Erpicum, communications manager at Cranstoun, hopes the exhibition will help change the public’s negative perception of drug and alcohol addicts and those in recovery.
“The exhibition is a way of showing that people who have suffered substance misuse have talents and can express themselves – they are people like everybody else and they want to get a brighter future too.”
Most of the artwork was created by people, like Sefer, who have completed their journey to recovery.
Sol Bukhari, a former drug user and criminal, is now studying media at Portsmouth University. He is exhibiting a collage showing images of his friend Natalie McCutcheon, a former alcohol addict, posing on the grand stone steps of a building. In one she is slumped in despair over a cardboard sign reading “Rock bottom.”In the next she is reaching pathetically out, clutching a sign pleading “Help.” The final image shows her beginning to ascend the steps to her new life.
“This pretty much shows my journey to recovery,” says Sol. “I was in and out of prison for robbery to fuel my habit. I realised that if I didn’t try to recover I would either go to prison again or die. It was really hard for me to take the first steps, but thanks to Cranstoun I’ve turned my life around.”
Other artists have not yet found the way out of addiction. A sculpture done by two artists, known only as M & M, attending a Cranstoun support group in Islington, shows two figures emerging from a mass of clay, their lower bodies still trapped in the past events that triggered substance abuse. Another is a wire head with cloud shaped pieces of paper hanging inside, called Head and Thoughts.
Terry, who refused to give his surname, worked on this head with other members of a Portsmouth based recovery group, describes how making the artwork gave the addicts a focus: “There were a lot of people who said they couldn’t draw, they couldn’t paint. The head helps them express their thoughts on addiction, giving them something to focus on outside themselves and enabling them to be heard.”
Another exhibitor, Lucinda Owen, 40, is using her experience of recovering from drug addiction to help others do the same. Her artwork is a tee-shirt she wore on raves, knotted up to show the confusion of the first stages of recovery.
“I’d been using since I was 13; I enjoyed drugs but had no quality of life. I’ve been clean for three years, and am running fashion shows and workshops for service users, to occupy them and help them gain empowerment and move forward.”
The artwork is of varying standards – the sculpture looks like the work of a professional, others resemble child’s drawings and bits keep falling off the wire head. However, they all convey a sense of honesty, and hope, not just for the artists’ own futures but for other addicts seeking a way out.
Sefer says: “If my words can work for somebody else and inspire somebody else that’s all I need.”
Newspaper Journalism student at City University, London. Cambridge Graduate. Interested in all occurrences in Islington. Business editor of Islington Now.