DreamWork: Christie Brown
DreamWork: Christie Brown
Freud Museum, London NW3
23 November 2012 – 10 February 2013
Reviewed by Shane Enright
There are only five works in four homely rooms, but Christie Brown’s exhibition at the Freud Museum delivers substantive arguments by the most allusive of means. Her setting is the rather grand home in Hampstead where Sigmund Freud took refuge for his last year of life in 1938. Subsequently the home and practice of his daughter Anna, a founder of child psychology, in the 1980s the house became a memorial to their psychoanalytic legacy.
The first two works are to be found in Freud’s ground-floor knock-through study: a roped-off room replete with his library and extensive collections of antique Egyptian, Roman and Chinese figurines. Here, stretched out on the original analytic couch brought from Vienna on which patients would describe to Freud their free associations, is Eros – an unglazed porcelain figure, moulded and jointed, half-clad in black satin, staring, rather impassively, into
a middle distance somewhere out of focus. Doll-like, the child-sized figure
lies limp and acquiescent, lost in distant thought, a melancholy object.
Here too, scattered among the crowded shelves, cabinets and mantels, are the 10 small turquoise figurines that make up Brown’s Teddy Bear Shabti. Though this is an older work – the only one here not first conceived for this space – the figurines play hide and seek with their Egyptian funerary counterparts, reminders that archetypes don’t have to be solemn, that fairytales can impel dreams as surely as classical and pre-classical mythology.
Upstairs, in Anna Freud’s room, is I Pray Again, Again – an assemblage
of two score unglazed white porcelain figures standing shoulder-to-shoulder
in small groups above a bookcase, under a side table, among framed family photos on a bureau, and here and there in the corners. These doll-like mould-made boys and girls, stripped of individuality by virtue of their repetition, are made all the more unfathomable by the fine wax softening their facial expressions. There is something poignant here, a hint,
but no more, of the weight of childhood dreams that will have found expression in this space.
The adjacent room, a plain white space, hosts Sleepover, a score or more of knee-high white moulded ceramic figures. Adults this time, they gather in groups, animated and purposeful: characters brought to life by the combination and recombination of archetypal features drawn from Freud’s eclectic archaeological collection. Some bear the snout of Anubis; others wear a crown of rays like Lady Liberty, or hold outstretched forearms in votive gestures. One has a tail; another, the ears of a hare. Unlike the children next door, these figures are imbued with personality and moodiness.
The final piece in the exhibition, My Desk, is a gathering of artefacts on the half-landing. There are more Teddy Shabtis, in terracotta this time, alongside torsos and busts, prototypes and archetypes cluttering the surface like half-formed ideas. This desk of propositions, opportunities, trials and errors perhaps evokes most powerfully the ethos of the museum – the distance between the manifest and the latent, and the contingency of interpretation. It is in the lingering afterthoughts, the doubts, the misconstrued recollections that this gathering of works gains its force. In the contrived fustiness of this museum, Christie Brown’s installations transform the static and inanimate into something dynamic and purposeful, but always allusive and almost beyond reach.
Shane Enright is a freelance writer on crafts and contemporary culture
