William Cobbing’s solo exhibition ‘Gradiva Project’ at The Freud Museum incorporates new sculpture, installation and video that refer to the Gradiva bas-relief displayed in Freud’s study.  Gradiva is the subject of Wilhelm Jensen’s gothic novel, in which a young archaeologist, Hanold, dreams of the bas-relief coming to life from stone only to be buried alive underneath the ash of the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius. Hanold becomes enthralled with her distinctive gait (Gradiva meaning ‘beautiful step’), deluding himself that the fantasy of his dream can play out into the reality of his waking hours. Freud was fascinated by the novel’s archaeological dream narrative, relating it to his own psychoanalytic enquiry, namely ‘burial by repression and excavation by analysis’.

For the exhibition William Cobbing has embossed a copy of the Gradiva bas-relief onto a cast iron manhole cover, installing it in place of the existing cover on the pathway of the Freud Museum’s front garden.  The motif of the manhole cover represents a portal between exposed and hidden worlds, perhaps echoing Freud’s own psychoanalytic musings on the divide between the conscious and unconscious.  Elsewhere in the museum Cobbing has created works drawing on Gradiva’s narrative of burial, memory and desire. In a series of videos people appear to be buried alive under layers of earthly material, wrestling with each other or their surroundings, to unsettlingly surreal effect. 

Discretely blended into the domestic space of the museum is an immured figure, buried under layers of concrete and plumbed into a doorway, prompting a sense of a parallel existence behind the walls of the museum.