All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 1 month.
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“All my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood”, wrote Louise Bourgeois in the 1998 collection of her writings Deconstruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father. “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” For both Bourgeois and Paula Rego, two of the most eminent artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, childhood memories and the folktales and myths which shape our formative impressions of the world have been central to their work.
This online day course invites you to explore the magical and macabre worlds of Bourgeois and Rego, focusing on their relationship with fairy tales, myths and folklore, and its connections with psychoanalysis. We’ll investigate some of the tales which influenced them in childhood, chart the impact of these stories on their art, and discuss the continuing resonances of their work and these stories in the world today. The course will be led by artists, researchers and regular Freud Museum collaborators Dr Elizabeth Dearnley and Dr Katharine Fry (whose previous courses Living Dolls and The Monstrous Feminine are also available on video).
No previous knowledge of Bourgeois, Rego or fairy tales is needed, although you are warmly invited to bring along your own responses to these artists and their worlds to add to the discussion!
The course will run from 10am to 5.30pm GMT and be divided into three two-hour sessions:
Session 1: Louise Bourgeois, Footsteps of a Family
This session focuses on Louise Bourgeois’ family history; the memories and psychodrama that were to be the bedrock and driving force of her long and varied practice. We’ll examine Bourgeois’ relationship to the Mother and the Father, moving out from her own family dynamics to the archetypal figures of myth and story, the weaver and spider mother, Arachne, the flawed, tyrannical father and the urge to destroy him. We’ll finish with her decades long relationship with psychoanalysis and her self-identification as a hysteric.
Session 2: Paula Rego, Facing the Fairy Tale
This session focuses on Paula Rego’s references to and feminist reworking of classic fairy tales. We’ll examine how she mixes known characters and tropes with real women in everyday domestic situations, beginning with the intimacy of her own family to the social plight of women across multiple contexts. On this journey, we’ll unpack the power game of purity in ‘Snow White’ and the treacherous family dynamics of ‘Peter Pan’.
Session 3: Through the Body Into the Story
Looking beyond Bourgeois and Rego, this final section looks at a constellation of artists whose works bring together the psychoanalytic, the mythic, the family and the fearsome to represent female experience and shatter feminine expectations. We’ll explore key works by Alice Anderson, Sophie Calle, Leonora Carrington, Katharina Fritsch, Joan Jonas, Rachel Maclean, Linsdey Mendick, Ana Mendieta, Pippilotti Riist, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Dorothea Tanning and Francesca Woodman, the core tales they reference and the tactics they use to tell feminist stories.
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Course Leaders:
Dr Elizabeth Dearnley is a writer, artist and folklorist whose work explores fairy tales, horror and interactive storytelling. She has curated several projects exploring the intersections of folklore and place, including mass diary-writing project ‘The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury’ (2017-22), immersive 1940s Red Riding Hood retelling ‘Big Teeth’ (2017-18), Cottingley Fairies reimagining Fairy Light (2022-23) and the Freud Museum London’s uncanny restaging of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ as part of its The Uncanny: A Centenary (2019-20).
She is the editor of weird fiction collections Into the ‘London Fog’ (British Library, 2020), ‘Fearsome Fairies’ (British Library, 2021) and ‘Deadly Dolls’ (British Library, 2024), and a regular contributor to the ‘Times Literary Supplement’ and folklore zines ‘Cunning Folk’ and ‘Hellebore’. Elizabeth holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was awarded a practice-based Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at University College London exploring the evolution of Red Riding Hood.
Alongside her courses for the Freud Museum, Elizabeth is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. She has previously taught at the University of London, UCL and the University of Cambridge, and regularly leads workshops at universities, festivals and cultural organisations around the world.
Dr Katharine Fry is a visual artist and researcher working across performance, film and sculpture. She stages unsettling encounters with uncanny bodies, using an all-female cast of fantasy automatons who are often physically fused to their environments. Her focus is on the body as the boundary where self and other meet, the site of an ambivalent desire for separation and connection she calls house arrest.
‘When I’m with you’, Katharine’s debut feature length animation, premiered at the Barbican in 2022 and was voted one of the best films of 2022 in Sight and Sound’s annual poll. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Barbican Centre and Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image (2022); Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2021), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, USA (2022, 2019); Visions in the Nunnery, London (2018); Terror Has No Shape, Camden Arts Centre, London (2018), Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland (2018), Oriel Davies Open, Newtown, Wales, (2018); and The Modern Language Experiment, Folkestone Triennial, (2017). Solo exhibitions include Please call me home at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London (2021); Addressing the Self: Decoys and Consolations at new media art space, Tennessee, USA (2020). Prizes include Hauser & Wirth First Prize and Soho House Mentoring Prize for Black Swan Open (2018) and First Prize for Creekside Open (2017).
Katharine lectures at the Freud Museum, Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, University of London. She is developing her new film The Fur Chest on mother-daughter relationships with the Museum of the Home, London as a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow in the School of Design and Creative Arts at Loughborough University.
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Tickets: £45
Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.
A limited number of £15 bursary tickets are available for those under financial hardship. Priority will be given to UK unemployed and PIP/ESA claimants. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.
The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.
