Freud Museum project, porcelain, terracotta, transfer drawings, mixed media, 2010

Inspiration:

When I first visited the Freud Museum, I was really intrigued by his art collection which were mostly Ancient Egypt, Greek, Chinese figurines and pots. Even he said that when he arrived in London as a refugee; “If I were to arrive as a rich man, I would start a new collection…” Therefore, I wanted to give him a new collection in England.

Dream stories:

There were some dream stories displayed with small objects in the museum, those dream stories are from his book ‘The interpretation of Dreams’.

A parody of his figurines:

I matched his old figurines with dream stories together and used his old collection as a visual language of description of the dream stories. For example, there is a dream story called ‘A Child Dead-Wish Dream’ In the story, there is a line: ‘A whole crowd of children — all her brothers, sisters and cousins of both sexes -were romping in a field. Suddenly they all grew wings, flew away and disappeared’ So I used and copied Eros figurines to describe the story, but on the back I put children’s images which were the interpretation of the dream according to Freud’s theory.

Flat-back figurines:

I wanted to give him a new collection with a little bit sense of Englishness. I made all figurines with flat-back style like the Staffordshire flat-back figurines. Then I put the visual interpretation of the dream stories that Freud analysed.