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Touch & Tell
Solveigh Goett & Judith Alder
Freud Museum London
7 September - 2 October 2011
As we walk fearfully in dark places, guided by only the touch of our hands, so we seem to stand blindly in life, circled by doubt of foreignness in things.
Anna Freud
Everyday life and scholarly activity, art and science, reality and imagination, the ordinary and the extraordinary mingle in the memory space of the Freud Museum. Rather than mere display of memorabilia or illustration of psychoanalytic discourse it draws the visitor into the materiality and complexity of human experience and the continuous quest to make sense of it. In this richly textured home of stories – told, untold, unfolding and yet to emerge – visitors are drawn in to explore a web of possible relationships between past inhabitants – Sigmund and Anna Freud, Anna’s lifelong companion Dorothy Burlingham, and the many people with whom they worked and who visited the house in Maresfield Gardens. With poetic and sensory interventions that blend into the fabric of the house, Solveigh Goett and Judith Alder pick up the threads of past habitation to encourage new ways of making meaning and enticing the imagination. Personal narratives, dreams and fantasies, hopes and fears, childhood memories and learned histories come together in the artists’ work; a potent mix through which suggestions of new, evolving narratives emerge - never quite there, felt but not seen, yet to be made sense of.
For Touch & Tell the museum’s exhibition space is turned into a cabinet of wonders where the tangible and intangible interplay. While in the glass cabinets dangerous, fragile and secret things are kept out of reach, the other displays break with the traditional touch taboo of museums and galleries. Visitors are encouraged to open boxes and books, to gently explore with curious hands as well as eyes and mind, to rummage through the drawers of the artist’s memories and imaginations as if they were their own.
Drawing on her rich archives of textile materials and stories Solveigh Goett’s evocative and often multi-sensory artefacts are dedicated to the small things in life, creating intimate story spaces to reflect on human experience. Entangled in the cultural web of Freud’s life story work through her background in narrative research, Goett picks up threads from the memory fabric of the house and adds her own tales, objects and characters through her textile work. Her practice extends and builds upon the habit of knitting and weaving that accompanied much of Anna’s Freud intellectual work. The concepts which inform the making of her artefacts and objects are reflected in the intricate patterns on Freud’s consulting couch which in turn mirror the complex tapestry of the minds that rested on it. Her tactile work and insistence on freedom to touch pays homage to Dorothy Burlingham’s work with the blind.
Judith Alder’s Books & Boxes (2001 – 2011), reminiscent of the forgotten contents of family attics, seem familiar yet removed from reality. Like old diaries or photograph albums, these books and boxes are embossed with the traces of life’s experiences. Repositories of fragments of personal histories, these are private and precious. Perhaps forgotten, yet impossible to discard they must be carefully stored, put away, archived. One box remains sealed, the contents unknown; the others however, their fastenings undone for the Freud Museum, are laid open to public view, the inner text and textiles suggesting private passions, suppressed emotions, confusion, conflict and uncertainties.
In the act of opening, a bridge is formed between artist and visitor, public and private, a brief encounter that eliminates visual distance: while we can see without being seen, we cannot touch without being touched.
Touch is a key element of interaction with Goett’s story boxes and cabinets. It is her intention that a touch might cause a sound or leave visible marks in the work, and through synaesthetic memory the sensation of touch can be sensed and imagined. Yet away from the cabinets of curiosity, touch continues to play an important role. In her series of works crafted from old family nightgowns, Goett creates a cast of characters who seem to have escaped from the dream-scape of the bedroom to haunt the house’s public spaces. We might almost feel the tremble of butterflies wings as they hover over MothMan’s shoulder and the quiver of feathers growing from BirdMan’s sleeve, catch the faint smell of wool as we brush against MuttonMan’s hem, sense the spiky disapproval of Noli me tangere’s silvery wire fur. All are twilight creatures caught up in metamorphosis in the contested territory between dream and reality.
Another cast of characters enters the story world of the house through The Visitor videos. Part of a collaboration between Judith Alder and artist and performer Clare Whistler, the works respond to special sites, exploring our relationship with the world we live in and our attempts to understand it by tracing and mapping our own and others’ histories. Visiting sites embedded with their own histories, physically engaging with place and time, Alder and Whistler have created fragments of fictions, each one imbued with a sense of place, invested with its own unique learned, imagined and implied narratives. These small fictions play with an unfamiliarity in the familiar as Alder and Whistler embrace the presence of “a foreignness in things”.
Solveigh Goett PhD is a textile artist and narrative researcher working with the literal and metaphorical fabrics of life that clothe not only our bodies and environments, but also our memories, thoughts and theories. Challenging the ocular-centricity of museums and galleries her tactile work aims to enrich visitors’ experience and attract audiences who through loss of sight are often excluded from enjoying the visual arts.
http://solveighgoett.blogspot.com/search?q=freud
Judith Alder MA is a visual artist. Her work responds to people, place and time and takes form through a bricolage of intermingled ideas and experiences from past and present in physical manifestations which range from carefully crafted artefacts and drawings to texts, photographs, videos and installation.