Summary: Part 4: Janice West - Serious Toys. <br> <br> This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. <br> <br> The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (<a href="http://www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com/">www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com</a>) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. <br> <br> Speaker Biographies & Abstracts <br> <br> Janice West is a London-based independent researcher and curator. With Tessa Peters she has created a number of exhibitions: The Uncanny Room,( 2002) at Pizthanger Manor, Ealing and re-staged at the Bowes Museum, County Durham;, The Secret Life of the Office (2008) Arts and Business, London, The House of Words (2009) Dr Johnson House, London and Memoranda, 2011 Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Each exhibition was accompanied by a publication edited by the curators. She has curated and organized other exhibitions: Made to wear: Creativity in Contemporary Jewellery (1998) Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London and wrote the accompanying book; and The Era: A hundred years of London Theatre (2008) for the City of Westminster Archives Centre. She has written essays for exhibition catalogues and books, notably Christie Brown: The cast of characters (1995) University of Westminster; Maud Cotter : Mute displacement(1995) Galerie Schlossgoart, Luxembourg, and Footnotes: On shoes Rutgers University Press,(2001). <br> <br> Abstract: Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny he notes the uncanny effect produced by “...waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata”. and discusses the paradoxical feelings that they produce in the viewer. The contradictions of an object that appears to be alive and autonomous but is created and controlled by man and often built for human enjoyment are acutely pertinent in a world where AI departments are working on ideal cyberhumans. The conflicted desire these creations brings are freighted with fear and anxiety as well as pleasure and will be discussed in this paper with examples from John Joseph Merlin to Hiroshi Ishiguro via Burne-Jones and Bladerunner. <br>
