The Spaces of the Unconcious: Kathleen Fox

About

This multi-media installation by artist Kathleen Fox is part of the established ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions at the Freud Museum London. Kathleen Fox situates her practice within the critical context of surrealism, a movement explicitly grounded in creative response to Freud's psychoanalytical discourse. The exhibition is centred in a collection of mounted boxes that use light, sound and texture to introduce themes of eroticism and death that underpin the realm of the unconscious. The work aims to model and explore Freud's spatial concept of the conscious and unconscious mind - for which he used the metaphor of a house and its component rooms. Set in a space that was previously Freud's bedroom, the exhibition is divided into two areas; the conscious and the unconscious, with a sensor standing guard between the two. The positioning evident in Freud's hypothesis will be reversed: the first area to be entered will be the room of consciousness, furnished to give the impression of a domestic space. The viewer is then invited to pass through a membrane into a second darkened ‘unconscious' room, which houses the mounted boxes whose contents are only revealed on close inspection through small apertures. The installation questions the ways in which the thresholds between the conscious and the unconscious are negotiated and how the viewer is impelled into spaces that are simultaneously real and imaginary. It invites re-assessment of how Freud's theory has been utilised and developed within surrealism, something which will be a central theme of the accompanying one-day conference, to be held on Saturday 09 October. The artist has exhibited and published her work internationally, often within the context of surrealist group activities, notably the exhibition As far As My Legs Can Carry me at the Terezin Memorial Museum in the Czech Republic (2008). The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Henry Moore Foundation and Norwich University College of the Arts. For further information and press images, please contact info@freud.org.uk or call +44 (0)20 7435 2002