Narrative:

Update from Georgia and Peter July 2025:

Georgia:

Peter has informed me that Jane stipulated an edition of 10 for her bronze medals. The reference to 1 of 2 on the packaging must have meant the two that were cast at that time. I am unsure where the second from this casting is, but will continue my search.

These medals of Lucian were extremely important to Jane, and incredibly intimate. I remember Jane saying to me the significance of being able to hold her father in her hand, someone that had seemed so distant and absent was now holdable, if that makes sense!

Peter:
On the edition number, all I know is that Jane generally seemed to apply an edition of 10 to the medals she made herself (non commissions) such as her crushed can medals (Heads and Heads, etc).

She of course stopped making non commissioned medals later in her career generally with the odd exception.

The special thing about Truth is that Jane was only permitted by Lucian to do a medal of him right at the end of his life, despite asking him decades earlier. He apparently said to Jane then that he didn’t wish to appear vain. Jane said she would not show it anywhere but he said to her ‘all good work gets out’. Jane always took that as a big compliment from him. He said however that she could ‘do him’ when he was at the end of his life, hence the Truth medal!

So it is rather special and whether Jane would have applied an edition of 10 is unknown but I suspect she would have done because the chances are that many people will want one going forward.

https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2016/08/from-bronze-to-basalt-jane-mcadam-freuds-life-in-sculpture.html

The medal work affirmed that Jane was right in her instinct to make sculpture, to work with relief, particularly the idea of duality - two sides of things - and to introduce that conceptual element into the work gave her so much to hang her feelings and thoughts on.

Jane said: ‘I just so wanted to find reliefs, I didn’t want to make them…That’s why I started working with found objects, doing what I call conceptual sculpture…because medals don’t make any sense in the twenty first century in art terms, there were other objects that had taken over, that corresponded to the criteria for describing such a form, but they were more like things that had been run over by passing traffic than things you could carve or model’

Grief and its transcendence (Lost wax to lost fathers)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wj-PnYYPk1ZSUx1sbLH9ZUU6SUQpazRX/view?usp=drive_link

P.141 AT: You’ve explained with regard to the reverse of the ‘medal ode to my father,’ Truth, that the word TRUTH is carved into the surface featuring at its center the word rut - “an annual period of sexual activity in deer and some other mammals, during which the males fight each other for access to the females.” Another definition is “a sunken track or groove where vehicles get stuck.” Could you comment further on these references?

JMF: The assumption with the concept of truth is that there are truths to be discovered or created, however in my experience the deeper we go the more complicated things seem. One of the meanings of rut refers to a groove in the road where one is able to go a couple of inches forward or backward but nowhere else. For me it is a little like the notion of truth. My use of the word truth also has a personal meaning in reference to my father, for whom art was his truth, in that it was the only thing he ‘truly’ wanted to do. Knowing this created its own sense of rut.

JMF: The medal Truth helped me to accept my father’s behavior as containing something positive and perhaps spiritual, therefore allowing me to keep him as an inspiration rather than someone to react against which is of course the other side of acceptance. As you imply, perhaps it also helped me to accept myself.

You are clearly interested in embedded meanings - “rut” in Truth, and the number of meanings contained in THISHERE.