Housebound at Freud's house

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Alison Dunhill explores ‘Alice Anderson’s Childhood Rituals' at the Freud Museum, London

Hampstead’s spring-leafed road leads up or down to Alice Anderson’s Housebound, a a stunning and moving work that incorporates the exterior of Sigmund Freud’s London home, now the Freud Museum. The work evokes the artist’s fictional memories of  childhood rituals, developed to curb her  anxieties when separated from her mother, of winding threads (and later strands of hair) round parts of her body.

At the Freud Museum, skeins made from doll’s hair thread are spiralled individually into separate lengths the thickness of rope for the sculpture, but their semblance of strength is illusory. Their tension varies in a diagonal and rectilinear construction over the house’s exterior brick walls in a giant-child’s ‘cat’s cradle’ formation, so that the haphazard enclosing evokes the potential of the house to be lifted away in an industrial demolition or in a dream. These delicate deep copper-red rope skeins are lightly anchored to the flowerbeds’ earth in bundles like monster worm casts, in what Anderson calls roots. Hundreds of thousands of synthetic hair threads have been used to construct the ‘ropes’ to bind the house, in the doll factory.

Using industrial quantities of synthetic doll’s hair, Alice Anderson’s installation exhibition at the Freud Museum pays particular homage to Sigmund’s daughter Anna. Anderson playfully subverts Freud’s theory that a female compulsion to weave was a displacement of what he termed 'genital deficiency'. For the first time an artist has intervened directly in Freud’s youngest child’s room. 

Anna’s loom, which has deeply inspired the project, has particular significance for Anderson. The deep honey browns of the loom’s wooden structure are echoed in the red-gold shiny skeins of synthetic doll’s hair in a chance twinning that Anderson names, poetically, ‘chameleon colours’. In this room the hair skeins are spiralled into rope-sized fronds of the same dimensions as those used in the external Housebound. They loop and fall, water-like, from the loom to the floor, on which they bundle into big and small conglomerations, ‘capsules’on the floor,signifying collapsed, potentially intense energy.  The mother figure sits on Anna Freud’s wooden loom seat. She spins the myriad woven tissues that bind and release the daughter. Made in silicon and wax, her fine facial features and long lustrous free mane of hair exactly replicate the daughter’s in the next room, in a simulacrum that gently disturbs.

The Daughter Doll sits in the Confinement Room in a fictionalized version of a significant memory; as the artist says: ‘time operates as my working material, my canvas, as I reinvent my memories. The act of remembering generates an imaginative and fictive account of the past’. The daughter figure is confined by an enclosure that symbolizes the rules and expectations imposed by the mother. The enclosure’s grid structure is made from doll’s hair bound tightly round long pieces of straw. On the room’s walls vertical rods tightly bound with doll’s hair re-angle into horizontals; seven of these testify to the age the artist was when she first played out her anxiety-curbing rituals.

In another room are the ‘power figures’. The artist explained to me that these talismanic  and fetishistic objects have a protective function and constitute the third element in the mother/daughter relationship. Constructed mostly in a tight hair-binding process, the Parents sculpture is a threaded double humanoid. Another ‘power figure’has the bone of a finger and a hard high-heeled shoe protruding from the closed multi-threaded form. These tiny elements of identity pierce their bobbin-like anonymity.  A short video, Butterfly Ritual, played on continual loop, depicts the contrasting motions of tight binding/winding and its release down the thread onto the butterfly bobbin from the ‘spool’ finger. Movingly, the artist’s finger is bound so tightly with doll’s hair that its tip is swollen and blue. As the thread is transferred to the bobbin and the butterfly’s form is further enclosed and negated, the rhythm of its jerking motion re-animates it into a strong semblance of the flying insect. Anderson’s explored theme of binding and release is embedded in the video.

Just one hair thread has been used to construct the giant spider’s web through which we view Freud’s famous study. At close hand the web is almost invisible; when viewed from further away the ethereal structure, an emblem of maternal entrapment, glistens, its deep gold threads have the impossible delicacy of the almost-there.

Childhood Rituals is a powerful and moving exhibition that should not be missed. The museum must be commended for its participation in the project.