Wayfaring

Three works: 'Woganfreude', 'Cure for a Hannover' and 'In Treatment' shown in group exhibition, 'Wayfaring' at &Model, Leeds, UK.

The work is essentially a set - with one audience position - featuring an encounter between two drawn chairs and a host of objects placed between them. What the psychiatric session shares with the chat show is that there is one person who reveals the contents of their mind/narrative experience and the other whose job it is to encourage them to open up. I am interested in the lives of the objects that come between them or are in the line of sight of the analyst/host and analysand/guest.

In Freud’s home and workplace at 19 Bergasse, Vienna (and then at 20 Maresfield Gardens) his collection of antiquities remained in the consulting room and study, never over-spilling into the family rooms. Their separation from family life and committal to psychiatric space is much noted, suggesting an attachment of the collection to psychological work and, beyond the rooms themselves, to the contents of the mind. These figures were the sole, mute witnesses of Freud's analyses.

In making this work I isolated the table that was always placed between host and guest in a decade of episodes of the chat show, Wogan. Did what sat there become vessels or counterpoints for the ensuing dialogue?

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