The Haunted Self

Lomas, D. (2000). The haunted self. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

For me, Lomas highlighted my desire to tap into the unconscious, to make the viewer drawn into the familiar themes of isolation and alienation that I am trying to portray and are left lingering in the melancholy beauty of the emulsion lifts.

“With psychoanalysis as their muse, artists and poets were ready to tap into the unconscious well-springs of creativity for so long obscured by the veils of repression. The imagination is on the point of reclaiming its rights… surrealism is littered with such optimistic predictions, yet how successful were they in realising these aims in their art? What, we shall be asking repeatedly, is the status of the unconscious in surrealist images and objects?” Pg. 3

“A new agenda, dictated by feminism post-structuralism, and overtly informed by psychoanalysis in many instances, has taken place. Questions of identity and sexuality have been paramount in the new art history which, in consequence, has proved to have a fundamental affinity with the concerns that animated the surrealists more than half a century ago.” Pg. 7