Emma Talbot recounts her own real-life experiences through the immediate, inventive qualities of the drawn and handmade.
Running water (entretien quotidien), 2014. © the artist
Talbot reveals the workings of her mind, finding a means of registering her thoughts, memories, emotions, and psychological associations – the things that remain intangible – through a non-linear format.
The basis of her practice is ongoing drawing, giving a constantly developing account of her life that focuses on the thought processes that lend and narrate meaning to experience. Through the work’s proliferation of words and pictures, Talbot is able to leap back and forth in time and between memory and imagination to deliver an intimate, poetic and inventive world, charting her own psychology. Specifically, her work records pictures from the mind’s eye that can’t be captured by mechanical means, revealing idiosyncratic associations that underpin her personal narrative.
Talbot’s exhibition at Freud Museum London is representative of the type of material that might be brought to psychoanalysis, based on family, key memories, loves, anxieties, dreams and thought patterns. Considering the open nature of psychoanalytic discourse, previously unseen drawings are installed in groups, revealing the tangled and intertwined nature of emotive subjects.
Unravel These Knots presents work with a focus on two of Freud’s studies: ‘Screen Memories’ and ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. Talbot considers the potent memory of home furnishings and decoration as well as delivering an expose of her own dream images and thoughts.
This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of Coriander Studio, Worton Hall Studio and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Sex Fantasy, 2016, in Sigmund Freud’s study © the artist