26/11/2020

I've just been trying to pull the different strands of my work together, to see if there are themes that go through fit all. I realised that conflict, warfare and side-taking is a recurrent theme, starting with my 'British Bulldog' and my interest in WW2, through the silent emotional tussles between Freud and his early analysands. After comes the East India Company, which I understood mainly as cultural imperialism, somehow overlooking the damage. My most recent interest has been in the British Raj, though the conflict aspect only dawned on me as I delved deeper into the history of the invasion, you would really call it, of India by the British.

Maybe it is thinking about the styles that I'm attracted to that causes me also to consider conflict; the style of the furniture in Freud's house expresses anthropomorphically his time, the materials of leather, wood, tweed. This is in opposition to the 'matter' of his patients, dreams, fancies, terrors. With WW2, the hardware is a manifestation of the brilliance of the engineers, designers, architects, whose inventiveness produced machines to see, hear and, I must acknowledge, kill far away. In India, it is the comparison of the respectively feminised dress that intrigues me, the opulent maharajahs, the opulent viceroys, both using dress to signal hierarchy and place to each other.

Acceptance and rejection are part of the making process - I want this rather than that.