Jane’s work frequently finds inspiration from the rich source of her own family background, referencing both the remarkable collection of antiquities and sculptural objects collected by her grandfather and the cultural legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis which has had such a profound and lasting effect on contemporary psyche.

Large-scale reliefs of the artist’s late father. Inspired by sketches McAdam Freud made of her father as he lay on his deathbed, the installation is a memorial to his life and artistic legacy. The completed works comprise the original EarthStone Triptych together with Vassal, the shadow form (a new work). Divided equally into two separate parts, like a portmanteau, EarthStone Triptych is joined by a snake-like rim that brings the two halves together. The centre is left hollow, an inverse interior that alludes to the wild imagination of Freud and his many admirers as well as our own thoughts and projections.

https://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/jane-mcadam-freud-lucian-freud-my-father/

The work was exhibited for the first time in the Freud Museum – once home to her great grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Jane spent many hours with her father in the months before his death in July 2011 making sketches for this new work. The resultant work was shown at the museum alongside other smaller scale work and preparatory sketches.

“while my father was alive, I worked a lot with object based sculptures that physically create shadows and when he died I immediately made a large two part installation half of which represented the broken parts of a shadow and I lay it down on the floor. I put it down. The thing I had symbolically picked up in the Work us (his image), I’m metaphorically put down in the work shadow. Or did I throw down? It was in pieces as a reference to my inner world exhibiting that I was in pieces.”

Jungian shadow “Sculpturally speaking, an object in a certain light, throws a shadow. In a physical sense, the larger the object the greater the shadow cast. For the psychological characterisation of the shadow we might look to Jung, who understood the merit of the ‘shadow side’ and its important role in balancing the psyche in the interest of promoting personal growth. “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individuals conscious life, the blacker and denser it is” We might read this sentence by Jung (1940) to indicate that awareness is freedom.

Lost Wax to Lost Fathers: p138

“All art is about life and death as is all life in some sense. Acceptance of life is to accept death. One cannot be had without the other. The closed eye represents death and the open eye represents life. Many of my works are made in relief and deal wit this beautifully simple equation like the two sides of a coin that contain each other and are mutually dependent.

Shadow came about from the paper template that lay on the floor while I erected Earthstone Triptych from clay. When the clay sculpture was finished, i tidied the studio but missed the presence of the template, and so decided to make the template in its lying down form in clay as part of the installation, and have it operating as a three-dimentional shadow, cut into parts representing present and absent siblings.

My forms most often engage the two-dimensional/three-dimensional illusion, from the two-sided pick-up pieces to the large-scale forms. It is the process that I am most drawn to as it lies between painting/drawing and sculpture and contains the illusory and physical qualities of both.”

P139

“I started on Earthstone Triptych and showed him (Lucian) the tentative beginnings. I completed this and several sculptures very quickly, soon after my father’s death when he could no longer sit, in a sort of race against time to get the marks down from his image, so clear in my mind”