​​​​Yuiko  A.

About

 

'Our relations with self, objects and screens have been thrown into sharp new relief over the last year. In art schools, which were already rich with speculation on the relation between object, subject and agency, a whole new set of conditions came into play as we were forced to communicate entirely online.

 

 

Sigmund Freud’s desk

Psychoanalytic ‘objects’ are of course about relationships. Objects are usually persons, parts of persons, or symbols of them. This project – a week’s residency and a week’s response time – culminates in this online exhibition of the work by 18 postgraduate artists studying MA Sculpture. In it we consider objects in the widest interdisciplinary use of the term.

 

The opportunity to consider the relations between home space and work space, between objects present and objects on screen, in collaboration with the Freud Museum has been a delight. It comes while we are embedded in our own domestic spaces, which has had an intensity over the last 12 months like never before. The way that objects and spaces profoundly connect with us via screens is reflected in the psychic plasticity of Freud’s work on dreams. In combination with his avid collecting of material objects and antiquities (and their on-screen digitization), this has been fertile territory for our18 artists.

 

The work in this online exhibition, made as a response to our access to the museum, is resonant and timely.

Also providing invaluable insight for the artists during the project has been the expertise of the staff. Their granular knowledge of Freud’s life, his psychoanalytic theories, his objects and the house that he lived and worked in along with his analyst daughter Anna Freud have provided and enriched discussions.

 

In this moment, structural inequalities between people have been revealed as ever more acute. We long for touch and close contact when those are the very things made dangerous by disease transmission, and representation and language has become so critical to provide and bridge these relations.'

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Melanie Jackson, Royal College of Art Tutor