Narrative:

’Holly Stevenson Tracing the Irretraceable’

P. 16 HS: ‘I generally work with clay, once I’ve bisque fired a piece it becomes a white canvas, then I start thinking about how I can glaze it, so I’m thinking like a painter and a sculptor. I’m consciously working with Freudian aesthetics, which are the aesthetics of feeling. They are about horror. The uncanny is Freud’s biggest foray into aesthetics and within that comes the idea of displacement, auto fiction, homelessness.’

P. 17 HS: ‘I like to incorporate contradicting elements like male, female, love, hate, soft and hard, joyful and miserable, in the same way that contrapuntal music has two melodies played at the same time.’

P. 11 ‘Heads that function as traditional knitting machines and shoes walking in others’ footsteps. Red wool threads through these pieces, a direct reference to Freud’s father’s failed wool business in Pribor, but equally associative of the Kabbalah custom of wearing red thread worn to ward off evil, Ariadne’s life-saving yarn that enables Theseus to escape the Labyrinth, and of course blood lines.’

https://decoratingdissidence.substack.com/p/resistance-to-flatness-an-interview

(An interview with HS which might talks about this series of work but requires a subscription to access the full context)