Mending the psyche: art as reparation

Goldhill, J. and Ballard, F. and Pimentel, E. and Robinson, Carly Mending the psyche: art as reparation. [Show/Exhibition]

Abstract

Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation examines the ongoing process of mourning following a bereavement and the consequences of grief for the individual. Challenging the socially constructed narrative of grief as a time-limited experience, the exhibition highlights the reparative effects of art for the self, emphasising creativity as a mode of healing and the self as an entity in process. The exhibition presents this dynamic through the personal journeys of artists Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill. Mending the Psyche builds on Breathe: Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill (Freud Museum, London 2018) - an exhibition that drew on the psychoanalytical writings of Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal to highlight the reparative function of creativity in the artists’ work. It explores the ongoing mourning of the individual, and creativity as a mode of reparative ‘becoming’. Fay presents drawings highlighting the development of her practice: from her early renditions of plants; to her 10-year investigation of parental loss, searching for her lost mother who died in 1964; to recent circle drawings selected from a much larger series of nearly fifty. These drawings were initiated in 2019 following trips to Morocco and Iran and signify the possibility of some form of resolution or becoming after finding her mother again. Judy’s recent photographs and films centre around elemental matters - experiences of mortal illness and the composition of the earth itself. These are to do with changes of state - states of the body and changes to the volcanic matter of the earth itself in restless change. Her topics here range from her father’s final illness and death in an iron lung - emblematised as disembodied breath - the sounds and sights of which impacted her when she was one year old; to the fabulously distant light and gas carried across inter-stellar space. The creative paths of both artists expose the unfolding nature of grief, and the manifold ways in which art enables the person grieving to engage with their experience. Their works are located on autobiographical and psychological planes. They might also be seen to speak to histories and futures of technological development, racism and imperialism, war, the domestic, and the cosmic.

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