Gradiva Project

The 'Gradiva Project’ exhibition at the Freud Museum and Camden Art Centre concentrates on the sculptural language of entropy, casting, temporality and formlessness, linking them in a unique way to Roger Caillois’s psychoanalytic notions of ‘boundary condition’ and the uncanny.

Research for 'Gradiva Project' commenced at British School at Rome [BSR] during my Arts Council England ‘Helen Chadwick Fellowship’ (2005/6). Access to private collections of archaeology at Pompeii and to the Chiaramonti Gallery in The Vatican Museum facilitated the original research on the Gradiva bas-relief (housed in the Vatican Museum).

Sigmund Freud wrote extensively on Gradiva, who was fabled to have come to life from stone, then buried alive under the volcanic ash of Vesuvius in AD79. Freud likened the archaeological burial and excavation to his own psychoanalytic theories on repression and analysis. Subsequently, Gradiva was referred to and discussed by several surrealist artists, Louise Bourgeois, Victor Burgin, and Jacques Derrida.

The new artworks created for 'Gradiva Project' include a series of cast iron manhole covers with an embossed Gradiva bas-relief installed on site at Camden Arts Centre and Freud Museum. These works both echo the archaeological and psychoanalytic metaphors of burial and excavation, and conceptually draw on a post-minimalist sculptural discourse (Bruce Nauman, Rachel Whiteread, and Santiago Sierra).

The exhibition is accompanied by several events and an artist residency at Camden Art Centre entitled 'Galerie Gradiva', and a catalogue (essays by curator Jon Bird, Mignon Nixon, Joanne Morra, and Rebecca Heald, Camden Arts Centre, 2007).

The initial stages of 'Gradiva Project' were exhibited at BSR in the group exhibition 'Overlap' (03/2006), and in my solo exhibition at Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art in Aalst, Belgium (11-12/2006). Catalogues accompanied both these exhibitions, published by the venues, 2006.

'Gradiva Project' is funded by Arts Council England, and the Austrian Cultural Forum.