Summary: Part 2: Christie Brown Dreaming and Working. <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> Christie Brown is a practising artist based in north London and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. She graduated from Harrow School of Art in 1982 and her work is featured in several private and public collections in Europe and the USA. <br> <br> Abstract: The parallel disciplines of archaeology and psychoanalysis have inspired my art practice over many years and the ceramic medium is a key presence in museum collections, offering insights into the lives of human beings over time. As a figurative artist I am drawn to Freud’s collection of antiquities which inspired his use of the archaeology metaphor. The figure is especially powerful as a recipient for human emotion and projection giving rise to a rich cultural history of myths of origin and animated beings. In this talk I will present the ideas behind of my exhibition DreamWork and illustrate the development of my practice through figuration, narrative and installation.<br>
