Makers and scribblers: explorers of desire, fear and everything in between

Oona Grimes, Rachel Goodyear, Carol Seigel, Dr Cleo Van Velsen, chaired by Jeremy Akerman

Join artists Oona Grimes and Rachel Goodyear, Freud Museum London Director, Carol Seigel and Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy Dr Cleo Van Velsen, as they explore the artists’ work in the context of both the Freud family home and the Tall Tales touring exhibition programme.

Oona Grimes is a London based compulsive scribbler, maker and storyteller. She is a visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and Ruskin School of Art : Oxford University & University of the Arts London, represented by Danielle Arnaud.

Rachel Goodyear’s practice has a primary focus on drawing. Often using familiar but incongruous images, Goodyear’s delicately rendered works reference human fears and desires and pre-sent a precarious balance between the playful and the macabre. Rachel lives and works in Manchester, is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery and in 2015/2016 had a major solo exhibition Restless Guests, at The Drawing Centre, New York.

Carol Seigel has been Director of the Freud Museum London since 2009. Carol is a historian, and has worked at museums in London for over twenty years, including the Jewish Museum, the Museum of London, and Hampstead Museum.

Dr Cleo Van Velsen is currently the Responsible Clinician in the Personality Disorder Medium Secure Unit in East London. She has worked for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and has extensive experience in the assessment, management and treatment of those suffering with personality difficulties, violence and trauma. She is the coeditor of a textbook on Forensic Psychotherapy and section editor of the Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis.

Jeremy Akerman is an artist and one half of Akerman Daly (Est. 2004), an organisation dedicated to publishing writing by artists. AD’s online presence makes the case for text as image. Akerman’s city and rural landscape paintings deploy a perspectival axis that directs a viewer’s eye through the picture. The viewer’s eye travels in, finding that the painting collapses and re-constitutes itself as they do so.