Tracing The Irretraceable is an intimate exhibition looking at the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis to Holly Stevenson in dialogue with the Freud Museum collection and the collection of the late Jane McAdam Freud (1958–2022). The exhibition presents Stevenson’s ceramic sculptures dedicated to reading Freud through his personal collection of objects and reflects on McAdam Freud’s familial approach to the Freud Museum.
Here at the Freud Museum London Stevenson seeks to reveal how Freud’s interpretation of his stories locked within his own collection have influenced art. Her project In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray focuses on an object on Sigmund’s desk of unknown origins that was often filled with knickknacks. The Walking Cure returns to the story of Gradiva, inspired by a Roman bas-relief, which became a Surrealist muse. Her Sculptural method of reading Freud addressing the comings and goings of repression and eco-feminism through a Freudian lens results in a series of tantalising and humorous ceramic sculptures. McAdam Freud’s eighteen-month residency at the museum in 2006 culminated in the exhibition Relative Relations and Stevenson triangulates her conversation with the Freuds with two sculptural portraits by McAdam Freud, one of herself another of her father.
The exhibition marks the completion of the first F.A.R; the Freud Artist Residency established by the Jane McAdam Freud Estate. The title, Tracing the Irretraceable takes its cue from Freud’s poetic writing in The Interpretation of Dreams as Stevenson set out on the elusive search to trace knowledge of her own art working in line with that of McAdam Freud’s, and in turn a wider art-historical reading of Freud’s psychoanalytic legacy in contemporary art practice. Throughout the past eighteen months, the inaugural resident Holly Stevenson has spent time in Příbor, Czechia, the birth place of Sigmund and the resting home of his great-granddaughter, Jane McAdam Freud. McAdam Freud’s lively eponymous gallery is located on the central town square, where a presentation of Stevenson’s and McAdam Freud’s works created a dialogical exhibition.
Tracing the Irretraceable has been made possible with the generous support of the Jane McAdam Freud Estate and the Arts Council England Unlocking Collections Grant.