Ellen Gallagher’s project for the Freud Museum comprises a series of paintings and two 16mm films installed in the famous study and library. This new body of work has been inspired by Freud’s lesser-known early period of research into neuroscience and marine biology from 1876 –1896. Freud’s passion for Darwin’s theories led him to investigate the nervous system of the lamprey (Petromyzon) for which he did a series of drawings indicating the evolutionary principle that increasingly complex nervous systems can be built from more primitive elements. Freud’s unique scientific drawings have been displayed specially for the first time at the Museum to coincide with Gallagher’s site-specific installation. Ichthyosaurus alludes to the fact that Freud could have had an entirely different career as a marine biologist. In Gallagher’s films her fictional oceanographer wanders amidst a lost water-world gathering specimens and evokes a sense of our eternal quest for the irretrievable. She has also produced her own version of Freud’s celebrated print of Abu Simbel, the original of which usually hangs above the library fireplace. “I give the picture a slightly less Eurocentric perspective, a more multi directional flow from ancient Egypt to Sun Ra to George Clinton.” (EG)
 
 

Ichthyosaurus was a reptile that lived in the oceans some 200 million years ago. To Ellen Gallagher, the term evokes an arcane scientific code, a distant, deeply embedded memory and her new body of work is inspired by the young Freud’s early passion for Darwin. While in his early twenties, Freud did his own research on sea creatures at the marine zoology laboratory in Trieste. Writing to his friend Edward Silberstein in 1875, Freud contemplates his future career, perhaps as an oceanographer: “...had I been asked last year what was my dearest wish, I would have replied: a laboratory and free time, or a ship on the ocean with all the nstruments a scientist needs...” Ichthyosaurus was also a code used by the young Freud when writing to Silberstein, to describe a girl (Gisela Fluss) that he had a secret crush on. Freud’s early passion for marine biology is suggested by the so-called ‘Hollthurn’ dream published in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1900). He describes a recollection of a dream about finding a starfish washed up on the beach at Blackpool, England in 1875... “When I was nineteen years old I visited England for the first time and spent a whole day on the shore of the Irish Sea. I naturally reveled in the opportunity of collecting the marine animals left behind by the tide and I was occupied with a starfish – the words ‘Hollthurn’ – and ‘holothurians (sea slugs)’ occurred to me at the beginning of the dream. When a charming little girl came up to me and said: “Is it a starfish? Is it alive?” “yes” I replied, “he is alive”, and at once embarrassed at my mistake, repeated the sentence correctly.” Ellen Gallagher finds an affinity with Freud’s early fascination for oceanography and his surprisingly accomplished drawing skills. As a student Gallagher spent a semester aboard an oceanographic research vessel. There she began researching the migratory patterns of pteropods, collecting and documenting the specimens under a microscope. “My project was studying pteropods – wing footed snails. I chose this subject after a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute gave a slide talk about pteropods and it appeared to me that they looked just like butterflies, it somehow never occurred to me that they were microscopic. In reality it meant that I was on a sailboat catching these tiny things every three hours during the night and then studying them under a microscope and drawing them.” Since 2001, Gallagher has been making a series of drawings entitled ‘Watery Ecstatic’. Carving directly into the thick pulpy watercolor stock, Gallagher creates a floating world, which she relates to the mythical Drexciya, an undersea world made up of those who were lost by suicide, murder, or slow death, along the perilous Middle Passage. For Gallagher, the Middle Passage is resonant as an origin myth – where language and imagery and music were reconfigured and recombined to create a mutable constant. Her carved, scratched, and splattered constructions depict fantastical sea-creatures, crustaceans, exotic seaweed and the trailing tentacles of weird jellyfish. Recalling the transformation Ariel sings about in The Tempest, the drowned slide into another dimension, suffering “a sea-change, into something rich and strange”. These themes also appear in her 16mm films, made in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne, where she uses a combination of animation techniques that include working directly on the filmstrip by scratching into the emulsion layer. Gallagher’s two new projections, sited within the highly charged space of Freud’s study and library, create a parallel fiction that resonates with Freud’s early oceanographic research. Strange creatures from this fictional underwater world are contained in specimen jars Gallagher has placed within Freud’s collection. Floating, suspended by their own weight, these creatures relate to Freud’s research into the nervous systems of the lamprey for which he created an exquisite series of drawings that have been specially displayed here for the first time.
Probing Freud’s fascination for Egypt, Gallagher has reworked the Abu Simbel photogravure, which usually hangs in Freud’s library. Adding elements of collage from vintage ‘race magazines’, as well as Sun Ra’s incredible film ‘Space is the Place ’, Gallagher builds “a tricked out , multi directional flow from Freud to ancient Egypt to Sun Ra to George Clinton.”
In his autobiography, Freud mentions that it was Darwin’s theories that inspired him to become a medical student. He became very curious about the early forms and origins of nervous systems and was keen to gain a sense of their slow evolution. He chose to do physiological research in the laboratory of the eminent Professor Ernst Brücke at Vienna University. Freud made a significant discovery that particular cells of this primitive fish were not radically different from those of higher animals and contrary to the scientific opinion at the time, he established that there was an evolutionary continuity of their nerve structure. This became the subject of Freud’s first scientific publication in 1877, ‘On the Spinal ganglia and spinal cord of Petromyzon’. His drawings to illustrate it reveal his keen observation and are full of precise details rendered very naturalistically. Scholars think that these early researches, inspired by a sense of evolution, would have been an important influence on his entire oeuvre, applying similar principles in his search for the precise structure of the human psyche. Ernest Jones, his biographer, spoke of Freud as “the Darwin of the mind”. (James Putnam)