Seminar - The Lost Object: On Gesture and Psychoanalysis SOLD OUT

This event has already taken place and ended on 3 Jul 2010

With particular reference to the exhibition Otto Zitko and Louise Bourgeois; Me, Myself and I, speakers will look at mark-making through a psychoanalytical lens. Speakers include Ann Coxon, Curator, Tate Modern, Dr Valerie Reardon, Senior Lecturer in Media, University College Marjon, Plymouth and Professor Jeremy Holmes MD FRCPsych BPC.

Ann Coxon will explore the therapeutic aspect of Bourgeois's drawings, looking in particular at the relationship between the figurative and abstract in her series of Insomnia Drawings 1994-1995 and the artist's practice of drawing as a means of metaphorically ‘keeping her house in order'. 

Dr Valerie Reardon will ask: In this age of (alleged) equality, is it still possible to talk about female difference? Feminism has pretty much disappeared from the mainstream, with particular reference to Irigaray's essay The Gesture in Psychoanalysis.

Professor Jeremy Holmes will approach Bourgeoise through the eyes of a naive outsider. ‘I shall describe current work in Attachment Theory which suggests that the mother's face is the primary locus where the child begins to know him or herself and to acquire a sense of playfulness and creativity. I shall suggest that the artist and his/her work is a continuation of this relationship, but one that, unlike the mother, over which the artist has at least partial control. Speculating that Bourgoise's own mother may have been depressed and therefore unresponsive, I imagine her work, in part at least, as both representing and transcending the unmirroring mother. Her faceless bodies, dismembered organs, repeating organic forms and disparate collections of objects in rooms, all reflect the attempt to create coherence in a confusing and fractured mirroring surface.'

Programme
2pm Welcome: Gill Nicol, Head of Interaction, Arnolfini
2.05 Introduction: Tom Trevor, Director, Arnolfini
2.20 Presentation 1: Dr. Valerie Reardon, University College Marjon, Plymouth
2.50 Presentation 2: Professor Jeremy Holmes MD FRCPsych BPC
3.20 Questions
3.40 Break
3.55 Presentation 3: Ann Coxon, Curator, Tate Modern
4.25 Audience response John Hammersley and Nick Moore (to speak individually for 5 mins each)
4.40 Questions chaired by Tom Trevor
5.00 End

Professor Jeremy Holmes
Professor Jeremy Holmes MD FRCPsych BPC is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. For 35 years he worked as Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist in the NHS. He was Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and co-runs a Masters and Doctoral psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programme at Exeter University, where he is visiting Professor; and lectures nationally and internationally. He has written/edited 120 + papers and book chapters in the field of Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis and 15 books.

Ann Coxon
Ann Coxon is Assistant Curator at Tate Modern. She has curated numerous displays drawn from Tate's collection and projects and has also worked on a number of major exhibitions at Tate Modern and the touring retrospective Louise Bourgeois. In 2009 she co-curated Craftivism at Arnolfini. Ann has written a monograph on Louise Bourgeois for the Tate Modern Artists series which will be published in Sept 2010.

Valerie Reardon
Valerie Reardon began her professional career in New York where she worked in the music business as a writer and photographer, before relocating to Cornwall. She completed an MA in the history of modern art and design at University College Falmouth, which led to teaching and a PhD. She has exhibited her photographs and curated shows as well as publishing numerous articles of art criticism, most recently, a chapter on the YBA's for The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary British Culture.

John Hammersley
John Hammersley is an artist and researcher at Cardiff School of Art and Design. He is interested in the role dialogue can play as an art practice, and its contribution to different ways of thinking about art.

Nick Moore
Nick Moore is a painter, improvising musician, published poet and registered art therapist. He has been a practicing artist and educator for 20 years, is currently artist in residence in a GP surgery in Gloucester as part of the ArtLift project and is Outreach and Development Manager at Studio Upstairs, Bristol, a registered charity and therapeutic art community, having worked there as an art therapist for the last nine years.

Book Now