Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
DreamWork
DreamWork features a series of ceramic, figurative sculptures made in response to the collection and ideas of Sigmund Freud. The research considers how archaic collections can be animated through the introduction of figurative narrative sculpture. Brown’s artefacts were exhibited in the Freud Museum, in north London, where Freud spent the last 18 months of his life and where his personal collection of over 3,000 archaic and antique artefacts is housed. Brown’s ceramic sculpture responded both to Freud’s collection and to his psychoanalytic theories: she explored these themes through the making and placing of objects, both in the furnished rooms as intervention and in the Exhibition Room as a tableau installation. Research was conducted as part of the three-year, AHRC-funded ‘Ceramics in the Expanded Field’ project (£382K) for which Brown is PI.
Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.
Evolving ceramic practices have sought to examine ‘site’ as an arena of engagement with audience (Twomey), or ceramics as a medium of intervention in museum collections (de Waal). Artists such as Julian Stair respond to collections of ceramic objects, their technical expertise, their importance historically or the taxonomy used to display them. Brown’s practice is situated in this context but is differentiated primarily through an interest in articulating sites through their associated historical and personal thematics, referencing ideas and objects beyond ceramics, in a way that questions the more formal considerations of much recent work in the field. With DreamWork, Brown posed a series of overlapping questions: How can one activate hidden or potential narratives around the historic personality associated with the site in question, using ceramic figuration? How might a figurative ceramic practice draw upon, relate to and interact with a range of existing historical objects to achieve the above? Research involved studying several artefacts from the collections through photography, drawing and the making of ceramic maquettes. Large numbers of ceramic sculptures were produced from several moulds, which allowed for multiplication of form. The works were presented in the museum in carefully chosen spaces, using presentation methods such as tableaux and intervention to interact with the museum objects. The research shows how figurative ceramic practices can function to imaginatively mediate the life of a specific individual connected to the site in question through an activation of space. Its methods include the careful placement of ceramic objects in ways that enable a dialogue with the remnants of existing artefacts and personal effects, and the integration of intertextual and archival research with artistic practice, to inform the developmental process of making.
