a beginning, a middle and an end… or … how words come out of bodies ….

2017
Wild clay, plastic piping, wood, castors
150cm x 80cm x 80cm

Sculptures exhibited as part of group show, The Visitors, with artist Anna Salmane and curated by Cecliy Rainey, selected to be part of Goldsmiths MA Project Space Exhibitions 2017.

There is a clear connection between the outward act of biography, a written account about what we know about someone, and our own inward act of creating ourselves. Both are fictionalisations. We first talk ourselves into being, we bury, ‘the inarticulate self, the self before language’ (Philips, 1998) and then make up bearable fictions about ourselves, ‘we take refuge in plausible stories ….. we fear the immediacy of experience – the immediacy of instinctual desires.’ (Philips, 2014) burying, displacing and substituting, as a means of self-protection, to avoid suffering from the experience of our real selves. The real self is relinquished, becoming only a visitor, or the visited.

Philips, A. 1998. The Beast in the Nursery, London: Faber and Faber.
Philips, A. 2014. Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.