#teresawilson

[teresawilson1]

The Winter Gathering of the Lost Children

Window Installation in collaboration with Julie House, Dec- Jan 2019/20

Atrincham Open Studios CIO.

Don’t be angsty if your cotton nightie is flimsy and thin,

If your hair is straggly and knotty up with twigs and moss.

If your cold skinny fingies grip tighter together.

For tonight is the night of the Winter Gathering.

We will meet.

Don’t be angsty,

Don’t be angsty.

Come gather.

Come gather

Come gather...

[teresawilson1]

A3 size drawing using charcoal, pastel and candle wax. A portrait of a sculpture figure of a little girl.

The drawing continues my interest in the ‘outmoded’ and the uncanny or auratic gaze. The girl is a doll who appears to gaze at the viewer or to return our gaze. She is outmoded in the sense of recalling styles of dress from the past. Her features are at the same time youthful and weatherbeaten or wizened with age.

Hal Foster in his essay ‘Outmoded Spaces’ 1993, writes about the Freudian interpretation of the use of the ‘outmoded’ in the work of the Surrealists. From ‘Memory’ Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. By Ian Farr.

‘For the outmoded not only recalls the present to the past; it may also return the past to the present; in which case it often assumes a demonic guise...The Freudian uncanny may help us to see why: once repressed, the past, however blessed, cannot return so benignly, so auratically - precisely because it is damaged by repression. The demonic aspect of this recovered past is then the sign of this repression, of this estrangement from the blessed state of unity - whether with a childhood toy or (ultimately) with the maternal body. In Surrealism this demonic aspect is often described on the thing (the toy, the body) in the form of distortions....’