Locked inside the Maddening House

There is no exit, but death. But up on the tops the notion at least remains; a breathing space necessary for the escape-desperate pathos to recognise itself.

The possibility of a way out via peaceful parliamentary measures had its last chance in a hot June month of 2017 that momentarily melted percieved certainties as if they were plastic. And for many of us it was the first time in our adult lives we escaped the weight of depression. Perhaps this itself was already an hallucination, a Millennial one?

But it took until ‘operation: return to normal’, the escape from lockdown, to realise there was no longer a ‘way out’.

Operation: escape the Maddening House.

Between the Russian assault on Ukraine and the ‘attrocity exhibition’ of Gaza live-streamed, I reached an epiphany upon these tops, above the old-industrial North of England: I had never known how to be a human being, and by adulthood, through disorders, addictions, avoidance, art, I had been trying to find different ways of expressing this desire to ‘get out’.

These tops are the outback for the Northern psyche, they store our collective trauma as if it was carbon. They also speak the language of the ‘frontierism’ that scoured the desert, reached the moon, and then crashed back down and began to devour itself.

The roads and paths towards here have always held an absolutist promise to them, in that they seem to offer one way in/one way out. No Crossroads, no choice paralysis – just escape or come back down.

In my early 20s I would impulsively seek escape, drawn towards the tops by the trance-like Joy Division chant of ‘day in/day out/day in/day out’. I felt it ‘closing in’, and needed to get out before ‘it’ got me.

Today I know there is no true escape up here. ‘it’ is closing in; ‘it’ has won.

Regardless, the tops remain a crucial space in which to think.

Down there there no is thought no more, just chaos in the mind.

Technically in the Peak District, this area has avoided the post-pandemic influencer influenza that tramples over everything just to prove “I exist” in a culture where to be ignored is to be a living ghost, unimportant and forgotten.

On these outer-edges it is still possible to be alone through escaping the loneliness you feel subjected to down there. Its emptiness and waste allow for reprieve from a socially-constructed loneliness, dealt out as punishment for ‘failure’. Here there is space to be weak, to be a loser, a degenerate, a nobody, with no shame.

At the very start of the decade this epidemic of loneliness was eased by the Covid Pandemic Lockdown. Although it caused mass isolation, there was a reprieve from the loneliness of humiliation, failure, and all the necessary afflictations dealt out to mediate a functional seperation between successful and failed subjects in a neoliberal society.

But unfortunately it was also in this period that the networked mind ‘lost its mind’.

My late tutor called social media ‘the final battleground of Thatcherism’, and in the wake of the pandemic we were all now infected. All words became weaponised. And once the ‘better angels’ realised there was no escape, and justice had no horizon, indigation and accusation were all that was left.

Finger pointing in hell.

I feel a temporary peace looking at 320 million year old rocks, sunken and hidden amidst a deep mass of peat, like abandoned and rusting army tanks.

It seems that everything was formed in violence.

I long held faith in the human ability to prove such an idea wrong; that seismic change could be prised out on a pathway of peace. In the back of my heart the 2010s was the test ground, and I still had faith that the ‘networked mind’ could compound all historical traumas to reconstitute the collective psyche into something I felt was necessarily conducive towards thriving and surviving the 21st century.

I admit I no longer believe any of this. I now fear with an empty heart, that the violence that exploded since the pandemic is the start of what is to be expected.

I also admit am a weak person. I am somebody who has never been able to approach a conflict without taking the side of the opposition (I usually want to destroy me as much as they do).

For a long period of time I tormented and chastised myself for not being part of the noisy, active crowd – I felt I was betraying the mantras of the memefied 20th century activists, yellling at me from their graves.

I went to protests in the 2010s, usually balking, only to be found shakingly clutching a Strongbow in the nearest pub. The pressure to ‘show up’ contributed to excessive burn-outs as the 2020s restarted.

I fear the violence is now necessary, and inevitable. I sometimes believe it is collectively craved subconciously in the collective mindset: the only craving that unites us all in the Maddening House.

And it is on this subconcious level that it seems that all of us secretly wanted Donald Trump; we want the next catastrophe, we want the haste towards destruction, because destruction is the only thing that makes any sense when locked inside a Maddening House.

Progress lost its soul to the machine. It can longer seperate itself from all-encompassing spectacle and doesn’t even concieve that we need a way out. It produces pop culture that sounds increasingly dead behind the eyes before AI could even get done it without the effort.

I am a weak person, violence makes me nauseous and shakey. I cannot be part of the violence that is already around us. The violence that I fear is tragically necessary in order to get out of the Maddening House. None of this is easy to admit as a child born the year and in the place of the Miners’ Strike.

I wish I was more.

Part of my ‘journey’ since my epiphany 3 years ago, was to accept myself. But it’s hard to go easy on yourself in the Maddening House.

At least up on the tops (my tops) I can accept that it for what it is: locked in the Maddening House.

1993. Perranporth, Cornwall

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
View all responses

I always reflect on this holiday.

I’ve reflected on it through the music of the time; the dreamy-quality to the pop music on Virgin Fm or whatever station it was.

I’ve reflected on it through the incomparable movie ‘Jurrasic Park’ that set a new precedent for cinematic hedonia before we would be bogged down in the ‘CGI of things’.

I’ve related the happiness to how, as a world society, we were now supposedly in an ‘end of history’ period on lasting peace. liberated from the shackles of the psot.

And connecting all the aformentioned dots with one main driver: I’ve always reflected on it through the fortunes of my own family, of how my dad’s new job as an F.E teacher at the local college was now a game-changer in how I began to percieve the future.

For a long time in adulthood people would ask me about what I liked, where I liked, and what I would like to do with my leisure time (the dreaded ‘leasure’ time). More recently I think people have simply given up on asking me what I’m doing with my life.

Thus I long felt deep shame for responding by saying “the happiest time of my life was a holiday I took in the summer of 1993 as a 9 year old.

When you’re getting grey hairs, and all the other things that make you invisible to youth, and you’re still saying your happiest moment was in when you were 9, surely something has gone wrong?

Long story short: after years of struggle, I am starting to conclude that I am neurodiverse, and I never knew how to be a person in the ways that were given to me.

I don’t want to go into this more, and I’m inbetween this all being conclusive.

Yet it makes sense now that, aged 9, before puberty, before adolesence – before all those specific expectations that I could never live up to – would remain frozen in time as a moment where things felt good.

Art, indefinitely. The 2020s.

(This is the final chapter from the publication ‘Straight A’s: Anxiety, Anorexia, Alcohol, Ageing, and Art’, made for an exhibition of the same name).

I admit I’m still here; still trapped within the Straight A’s system of self-critical thoughts and go-to ‘remedies’, but I know I can’t physically upkeep these routines for much longer. I also admit I have written these stories countless times before. What is different now is that I can no longer use youth as a protection against truth.

My bones feel heavier…After years of walking long distances with a heavy rucksack the increasing throbbing pains tell me to stop, yet routine tells me to carry on like I’m 21. But I’m not… and the hope that there is something to save me around the corner has gone.

…But I know I’m not the only one…

I believe the struggle is partly generational. All Millennials (those who came of age in the years either side of the year 2000) were instilled with a ‘millenarian’ sense that all good things would finally reveal themselves in our near future. We’d grown up as the writer Francis Fukuyama’s famous ‘End of History’ proclamation had been willingly swallowed like a pill by an entire culture who had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of a coming age of lasting peace, where we could all find the freedom to live out our best lives.

But, by the 2010s, not only had this expectation been ground down (symbolised in the staggered punches of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash) but this collective anticipation had mutated into it’s opposite: a belief that the future would actually be worse than the present.

Whatever your current politics, I believe that this sense of a ‘lost future’ embedded in Millennials fueled the ‘momentum’ behind the Corbyn-led Labour Party, energised by what felt like a last chance to salvage a 21st century we thought we’d had been promised in the final years of the 20th century.

But after Corbyn’s terminal failure at the 2019 general election, we then faced a global pandemic lockdown, which although initially offering glimmers of a kinder way of living, ultimately ushered in an aggressive ‘back to normal’ that frog-marched us back into a world that was even worse than the one we’d had before.

Thus, I think it’s fair to say that many of us have found the years since 2020 the hardest we’ve known.

One Sunday afternoon in 2023 as I meandered around Sheffield trying to conjure a sense of purpose (something I’d done countless times during the last 20 years) I suddenly couldn’t take anymore; I had to accept the fact my life wasn’t working.

I’d ‘had enough’ many times before, but this time I’d had enough of having enough.

I’d reached a point where I was both ashamed and exhausted by the adult life I’d lead, and wished there was a ‘life amnesty’ where I could hand my life in. Lacking this option I shared a post on Instagram, publicly confirming that I had been living with a mental illness for all my adult life.

Even writing this provokes the inner critics to come out of the woodwork and shout: “you’re so fucking so self-absorbed, John!”

Throughout writing this story countless inner critics have popped into my head, criticising me and making me feel scared about what people will say to me when they get me alone.

However, worrying about somebody having a go at me, verbally cornering me in the smoker’s corner after 6 pints, is very reason I should write this! I have to escape this stage in my head; this unlimited-seater venue built for the unlimited critics and bullies; this is what keeps me ‘entombed in self-centredness’.

I have to convince myself that I’m not writing this for the approval of others: I’m writing for and to myself. It’s a letter to the life I missed due the Straight A’s, and the letter to a life I may still one day have a chance to lead.

Both Art and Anorexia were political decisions: both were subconscious rejections that manifested into states of being once adulthood encroached upon a body that didn’t know how to take shape in the world as it is presented. Both are responses to a social/political atmosphere that, even in your teenage bones, you know will never let you breathe the way you need to breathe.

Both begin as negatives to a positive that actually offer no positive at all.

As an Anorexic you retreat into the position of a ghost, standing on a fine line where you are neither present or absent. This suspense is held up in the hope that a world, a world you can live in, will come find you. You do not want to die, you just don’t want to be in a world where you cannot live.

Art, as a life practice, started from the same position as Anorexia. However, Art allows you to create your own rules, your own system of thinking, your own path, and by default your own take on ‘reality’. All Artists know how hard it is, when your world, the only world you can breathe in, is perpetually attacked by systems of doing and living that deny its right (and by extension, your right) to exist.

However, you have no choice but to carry on…

In 1999 we’d deface our high school ‘student planners’, and my mate changed my planner name from John Ledger to ‘Ooon Badger’. Initially it was a source of ridicule, but in 2006 I had the confidence to own Ooon Badger, and change it to embody the creative impulse in its spontaneous, joyous, life-full form. Ooon Badger disappeared before the end of the 2000s, but there’s something in it that I constantly crave to rekindle.

I’ll never stop making Art. But rather than only being able to perpetually say ‘fxxk you’ to a world I can’t properly live within, one day I’d love to be able to make it the positive affirmation of a life I wish to lead.

I may never stop having issues around social Anxiety, eating issues, depression, and Addictive tendencies. But I know that this is a milestone that must set a precedent where I allow myself to something better than the Straight A’s.

(I have a small amount of copies of this book remaining, if anyone is still interested in purchasing one please leave a comment).

Works that didn’t go into Straight A’s

Straight A’s was a once in a lifetime exhibition – at least in terms of life so far. It’s only for this reason I am sharing work that didn’t make Straight A’s, because I feel it is interesting to speak about.

Canary in the Coal mine

If I had been succesful with funding this sculptural proposal would have been made.

But it required welding and equally a skill-set I didn’t have.

I have explained why I used to Canary in the coal-mine analogy, relating the history of my home town to my own specific struggles with eating disorders, but in the end I think it couldn’t be done.

“IT’S WAR, THEN!” (2020)

A friend suggested I show this work as he believed it’s one of my strongest – and to be honest I think he is correct. However, the aggression of work wouldn’t have worked with the rest of the works.

The Alpha Forest (2009)

The Alpha Forest is the largest framed drawing I have ever made (5x10ft). I am still immensly eager to show this work, at least one more time before I realise it can’t survive many more winters in my dad’s shed. It’s size was the problem, and if I’d had put this in the exhibition, it would have consumed the exhibition.

Scanning for threat (2022)

I really wanted to show the map-making that has been so crucial to my work, especially since the 2010s. However these maps just didn’t fit in, and in turned out that the large sketchbook ‘Best Amongst Ruins’ touched upon the maps – if you had the patience to look through it for them.

Central Bombardment (2009)

This work, owned by a kind gentleman in south Sheffield, was available for me to use for the exhibition. The only problem was I’d misjudged the size and it wouldn’t fit in my car, and I couldn’t afford to hire a van all the way down to Abbeydale Road for one work.

New Brutality (2024)

Created with GIMP

‘Everybody’s Fracking’ (2015)’

‘Running on Gaslight’ (2023)

‘Monster’ (2017).

‘Who made the Monster?’

Big Exit: film

I had been reluctant to release Big Exit online, because it was primarily a film made to be seen in a gallery space. However, some people have told me they never got to see it in the space – so, on their behalf I have shared it here.

‘Canary in the Coal-mine’ at the Barnsley Civic.

Thank you everyone who came to the Barnsley Civic for ‘Canary in the Coal mine’ on April 11th, a talk and screening to close the exhibition Straight A’s at The Cooper Gallery.

Big thanks to Lucy Dewsnap for brilliantly chairing the event.

‘Canary in the Coal mine’ was a substitute title that I never used in the Straight A’s exhibition, that was originally going to be a work relating to my experiences with anorexia in my late teens early 20s.

I am always very conscious about how to relate to the history and culture of my home town. Some post-industrial towns have in recent years, in my opinion, had their present and future cultures weighed down by the habit of making art that constantly speaks to a refined version of what a place used to be.

Yet I am from Barnsley, a post-industrial mining town. I remember coal mines, albeit defunct ones on the demolition death row.

For those who are not aware of the ‘canary in the coal-mine’ analogy. Some of the worst pit disasters, including the worst one in England which happened in Barnsley in the 1860s, were due to gas explosions. Canaries were historically taken down pits by miners because they were more sensitive to toxic gases, and if the canary became sick or died it was a sign that the miners were also in danger. ‘Canary in the coal mine’ means ‘early warning sign’.

I don’t underplay the sense that some of the struggles I experienced in my young adult years felt like ‘early warning signs’ for a time, 20+ years later, where disorders are part of everyday life, and have basically become normalised. I’m not saying I have clairovoyant or visionary powers, but somehow the struggles that sent me backward, or least sideways in life, have, ironically given me experiences and thus artistic interpretations of things before they became common-place.

I used this opportunity and screening to show a much more edited down, and (in my opinion) aestehtically mature version of my 2019 film ‘Wall, i’. If Straight A’s is the most important project I have ever undertaken, Wall, i is a close 2nd. Both deal with the crisis of self-hood in an age where individualism is promoted above and beyond everything else – the age I grew up into, the age after the fall of any competing ideology to capitalism, specifically neoliberal capitalism.

unfortunately due to issues that were nobodies fault, there were quite a few technical issues with the film whilst it was being screened. Due to this I have posted the film here for anyone who wished to watch the re-edited version.

The long dark night of the political soul.

In the 2009 era-defining book Capitalist Realism, the writer Mark Fisher defined ‘reflexive impotence’ as state beyond that of apathy and cynicism; a reflex of impotence to the state of the world, societal affairs – the very things changing and affecting our everyday lives. The belief that any possibility of changing anything has already been made impossible.

Fisher published Capitalist Realism in the dying days of a New Labour mode of governance that he laid the blame on for naturalising Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there was no alternative to capitalism (no alternative to a world where everything including our own identity is subject to market forces).

I first read Capitalist Realism in the summer of 2010, 2 months after the Conservative Party formed a coalition with the Lib Dems and 2 months before the total reversal of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s promise of abolishing University tuition fees, which in turn triggered the most angry protests by young British people in a generation – the very people Fisher suggested were most affected by the state of ‘reflexive impotence’.

What radicalised these young people, turning them left-ward, was not necessarily an anger with capitalism per se, but that the prospective careers and futures they had been promised by this very system had to now be sacrificed at the alter of ‘austerity capitalism’. This knowledge, this awareness that the future that millennials had expected, was now being taken away, made them frantically look for alternatives.

As Fisher would continue to write before his death in 2017, the emergence of antagonistic forces to capitalist realism didn’t change the fact that everyday public, social and symbolic life was still capitalist realist in nature. However, these leftward desires of the 2010s that eventually found a figurehead in the-then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn briefly had an agency that was, at the very least, antagonistic to capitalist realism.

I always wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about the 2020s. Dying so close to that reality-melting moment when Corbyn’s goverment very nearly beat the Conservatives in the 2017 General Election, Fisher had just previously pitched a theoretical antidote to capitalist realism, called ‘Acid Communism’, arguing that although the neoliberal order that had created the state of capitalist realism felt time-immemorial, that, after all, ‘all of this was temporary’.

More specifically, I wonder how the ‘reflexive impotence’ of 2000s compares to our current state in 2026…

I have struggled intermittently with mental health battles all way through my life. But since the 2nd Covid 19 lockdown I have been continually in a state of depression, both with and without medication.

One thing that I feel is a crucial ingredient to the state of ‘reflexive impotence’ is self-hate, or more specifically the lack of an innate conviction that your life is ‘worthy’ . Positive political action, the kind that makes you joyously want to participate in collective action, requires you to first and foremost believe you are worthy of the life you have.

Whilst cynics resign themselves to a state of life in which they don’t think very well of themselves at all, those like myself, self-aware of their own self-hatred, and their lack of political involvement, are tormented by this situation. The cynic has the ability to forget how little they feel themselves worthy of a better life/world – they are able to reframe this pain as pleasure.

I believe that self-hatred is silently rife amongst a demographic of British people who have lost any progressive cause to naturally align with since the destruction of unionism and worrk-place solidarity – leaving them only with affilitions, and relationships with institutions that routunely humilate them.

This situation is identical to everything else stated above, but specifically this is about the erasure of the idea of any kind of social relations that don’t revolve around anything but competition between individuals and the consequential and never-ending state of self-evaluating yourself.

We all remember the 2000s for the reality TV shows, shows chocked full of people who were ‘failures’ in some way or another, for their inability to succesfully constantly self-evaluate and compete, with their bodies, minds and spending power, against everyone else. The noughties most hated, ‘The Chav‘, became a subject who self-identified, consciouslly or not, with cultures and behaviours that were viewed as degenerate, and low-life. 2016’s Brexit was, as much as it was racist/imperialist, about rejoicing in the disgusting, degenerate, destructive (this time with rare political agency).

Yet today, reflexive impotence and self-hated have qualitively different expressions. The evisceration of the opportunities for another political agency in the 2010s have led to what I, at least personally, am experiencing as ‘the dark night of the political soul’.

The term ‘doom scroll’ didn’t exist when Fisher first wrote about ‘reflexive impotence’ – it may not have even been in use when he passed away in 2017, in a time before long-form media was truly destroyed by video-shorts and Ai slop.

As an artist, who could, if I give myself credit, articulate the contemporary psycho-political landscape in a way that at least gave me a personal momentary sense of potency, I am deeply lost in a deluge of imagery of slaugther, hatred and pornification.

I am not certain about any of my thoughts anymore. I’m not even certain of my soul.

I recently took part in ‘beyond the scroll’ an event held at the exciting ArtBomb in Doncaster. These talks and performances came for everything that could be accounted for, and they were brilliant. I performed ‘Non-stop inertia: I’m too busy to meet you’ with my friend John Wright, fellow member of the largely historic artist collective ‘the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe’.

The performance went well, but I was haunted by a sense of deadness, of merely going through the motions.

I asked myself “This is something I do, this kind of thing? Right?”.

…yet, what has vanished since the last time we did this performance in the 2010s is a sense of life that could be different.

The political and the personal are recklessley misunderstood by our focus on the binary between altruism/empathy Vs selfishness. There is no real seperation – even though our personal lives aren’t other peoples lives, when we lose sense of meaning in one, the sense of meaning begins to give-way in the other.

I like many, have countless thought attempts to reach for an escape route that are continously foreclosed by images and accusations bubbling up from our state of omnicrises. Woke and anti-woke are already antiquated words in our era of Trump 2.0, yet these categorisations both became dominant in an age where accusation became the one remaining conceivable action for a population that could once more no longer see a way out.

Yet, as Fisher reminded us, ‘all of this is temporary’.

The dark night of the political soul may feel endless, but yet, it may end tomorrow….

I sure hope it does, because it is unbearable…for me…and for you…

Canary in the Coal Mine. John Ledger: An Art/Life Story

Canary in the Coal Mine John Ledger: An Art/Life Story (Talk & Film Screenings). 11th April/ 1pm

To mark the final day of his milestone exhibition Straight A’s: Anxiety, Anorexia, Alcohol, Ageing and Art at the Cooper Gallery, the Barnsley artist John Ledger will present a semi-autobiographical journey through his life as an artist through two of his film-works. People are encouraged to view John’s exhibition one last time, then come down to Barnsley Civic to listen to John discuss his work, whilst engaging with increasingly topical subjects and themes that his work explores, such as the connection between loneliness, self-hate, the politics of resent, toxic masculinity and political extremism.

The film works screened at this event are It’s War Then and Wall i and will be followed by a Q&A with the artists and a chance to socialise in the bar afterwards.

Some of the themes and content broached in these screenings are aspects of John’s work that was omitted from the Cooper Gallery exhibition. Some people may find the themes in this work triggering or inappropriate for a younger audience.

Recommended age 16+

Free entry. Booking recommended.

Straight A’s, milestone solo exhibition

My solo exhibition at The Cooper Gallery is still on for exactly another 2 months, and will be open from 10am-4pm except on Sundays.

The exhibition is running alongside “Expressing the Walls in My Mind” Children and Young People’s Emotional Health and Wellbeing.

In collaboration with artist Tony Wade and with support from Barnsley Civic, this exhibition is on display until 21 March in the Sadler Room. Just us are a passionate group of young people from Barnsley VCS organisations (Chilypep.YMCA Barnsley and the Youth Association) who work with Public Health to make a positive difference to children and young people’s emotional well-being and mental health.