Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable

Jokes Topple Taboos (2025) Ceramic: Glazed Stoneware Image ©Holly Stevenson

This intimate exhibition focuses on the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis to two contemporary artists, Holly Stevenson and the late Jane McAdam Freud, and marks the completion of the first FAR, the Freud Artist Residency established by the Jane McAdam Freud Estate.

Throughout the past eighteen months, the inaugural resident Holly Stevenson has spent time in Příbor, Czechia, the birth place of Sigmund and the resting home of his great-granddaughter, Jane McAdam Freud. McAdam Freud’s lively eponymous gallery is located on the central town square, where a presentation of Stevenson’s and McAdam Freud’s works created a dialogical exhibition.

The title, Tracing the Irretraceable takes its cue from Freud’s poetic writing in The Interpretation of Dreams as Stevenson set out on the elusive search to trace knowledge of her own art working in line with that of McAdam Freud’s, and in turn a wider art-historical reading of Freud’s psychoanalytic legacy in contemporary art practice.

Here at the Freud Museum London Stevenson seeks to reveal how Freud’s interpretation of his own collection has influenced art. McAdam Freud’s eighteen-month residency at the museum in 2006 culminated in the exhibition Relative Relations. Like McAdam Freud, Stevenson has made artwork pertaining to the museum collection and her project In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray, developed over a decade. The project addresses the comings and goings of repression, and has resulted in a series of tantalising ceramic sculptures. Through her sculptural method of reading Freud, Stevenson returns our focus to the ashtray, an object on Sigmund’s desk of unknown origins that was often filled with knickknacks.

Tracing the Irretraceable has been made possible with the generous support of the Jane McAdam Freud Estate and the Arts Council England Unlocking Collections Grant.