Freud Museum

The museum was Freud’s final home. His study room was famous for his psychoanalytic couch, and I found out he died in the same room. The rooms upstairs were an exhibition space, currently exhibiting 1920/2020: Freud and Pandemic. It was a comparison between the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1920 and Covid in 2020. There were a few artworks in the room reflecting on the first lockdown.

Phantoms of Surrealism, Whitechapel Gallery

This was a retrospective exhibition looking at the influences of women artists in the 1930s influenced surrealism. I was most drawn to Grace Pailthorpe’s Sea Urchin / The Escaped Prisoner (1938), because the painting was an attempt to explore her latent memories of birth and even life in the womb. I was interested by this piece because it’s not the usual inspiration of something in the external objects, referenced in the other artworks of the exhibition.

The Wellcome Collection

I visit this place on Euston Road often because it’s the combination of art, science and medicine. I’m interested in these themes as I have studied human biology before for a year. The vases in the permanent collection was interesting to me because the characteristics of the vases represented different health conditions and diseases. We may inherit family vases the same as how we inherit these ‘medical heirlooms’.

How the above relate to my work

My work draws from the domains of psychology, psychoanalysis and the human body because I’m handing in an annotated dream diary in my submission, as well as focusing my work on orifices. There’s a video by Vsauce on youtube about the human body and holes. In the next few weeks I need to work out how these would fit coherently together by testing through making.