Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals at Freud Museum

Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals at Freud Museum

14 April, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals make for a complex but brilliant exhibition at Freud Museum, according to Tom Jeffreys.

A quietly prosperous street in Hampstead seems, at first, an unusual home for a thinker as challenging and continuingly controversial as Sigmund Freud and his family. But really it isn't. Much of Freud's work is about the family, and about the home – the familiar and the everyday suddenly rendered strange, unknowable and other. 

In art circles, few concepts have been explored as frequently as Freud's notion of the unheimlich – the un-homely or uncanny – and nothing could render this 1920s Queen Anne-style house as uncanny as the past-presence of Freud himself. Nothing, that is, except for the complex work of increasingly acclaimed contemporary artist Alice Anderson, whose exhibition, Childhood Rituals, is currently wending its way through various rooms of the Freud Museum, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations.

The exhibition's immediate focal point is 'Housebound'. Entwined around the exterior of Freud's house are three thousand bobbins of flame-hued dolls' hair, roughly the same shade as Anderson's own. From the outside, this wraps the house up and offers it, like some strange gift, to passers-by. But from within, the effect is rather different. Peering through the upstairs windows, one feels a certain sense of entrapment – literally bound within and to this house-cum-archive. The rows of red brick houses outside become oddly estranged as a markedly distant 'other'.

Working in a similar way is 'Web', a sculpture made of a single dolls' hair suspended in Freud's study on the ground floor. It's a piece of simple, delicate brilliance – packed with both magic and melancholy. The dark bronze hair is silhouetted against the dull yellow glow of a spherical light – both blocking off and opening up a new way of looking into and over Freud's strange collection of books, figurines and other esoteric paraphernalia.

This idea of blocking off continues upstairs as a red-headed doll (representing Anderson herself) sits locked inside a cage whose bars are made of the same hair. Next-door in the Anna Freud Room sits a near-identical 'Mother Doll'. With an expression of impenetrable austerity, she toils at a large loom, weaving, one presumes, the very ropes that imprison her daughter. Half-sick of shadows, the pair of them perhaps.

Aside from the complex relationship between mother and daughter that informs all of Anderson's work, there's something else going on here that, for me, feels specific to the Freud Museum. Sometimes Anderson's work can feel too intensely personal: it's one of the things that makes her so  exciting, but it can also be quite solipsistic, wrapped up as it is in a very particular personal symbolism. But here these works are forced to address an outside – a history and system of meaning that is not solely internal. They address both Freud's personal history and Freud's theories (theories that in turn address the personal histories of every one of us).

In this sense, suddenly Alice Anderson's childhood rituals become part of something much more widely meaningful. Here in this public museum, which simultaneously opens up a once private house and ropes it off,  Anderson's own ropes weave through a history of personal memories; memories of (or indeed as) shared history. Both sensitive and forceful, carefully integrated and stubbornly self-contained, this is a quite remarkable show.

Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals is at Freud Museum until 5th June 2011.

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Tom Jeffreys