Camden New Journal - Feature: How to tap into your emotions

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The Review - FEATURE by SARA NEWMAN
Published: 27 December 2007

How to tap into your emotions

A VIDEO of an artist chipping away at his concrete-coated head (pictured) makes for disturbing viewing in the peaceful confines of Sigmund Freud’s former home in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead.
Upstairs another video set against a similar blue background hints at Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss and shows a man and a woman engrossed in the aimless ambition of grappling with one another’s clay-covered faces seemingly welded together indefinitely.
Conceptual artist William Cobbing, who lectures at St Martin’s School of Art, has paid painstaking attention to detail in his Gradiva Project at the Freud Museum. Gradiva in William Jensen’s Gothic novel is the ethereal mantle-dancer who becomes the subject of an archaeologist’s fantasies that she has come to life – an idea that engaged Freud as in 1907 he expounded his idea that love is a remedy for delusions.
Cobbing revisits the notion that sexual and emotional repression can be cured through excavation of one’s emotions and his startling exhibition is also amusing.
Mortality and discovery has been a feature of Cobbing’s journey since he began the Gradiva Project 18 months ago.
During the course of his research he found buried in the tomes at the British Library the revelation that another part of the relief is located in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy, and has been negligently annexed to an entirely different relief work.
He said: “I wanted to bring attention to this oversight.
“I find it incredible that this very famous masterpiece has ended up in this way.”

• Gradiva Project at the Freud Museum, London until January 27. Open: Wed to Sun, noon to 5pm. (Closed Boxing Day) Admission: £5 (£3 concessions)

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