Unfolding Anna Freud's Archive: New Knowledge through Soft Handling

Image: Felled Seam. Twice geological. Folded in, flattened fell. This one, secure, a proper club of rules. Sometime shirt seam, blouse seam. Body and geology. Deeper stuff. A proper inside, place of distinctness.  

This project is currently on hold - funding wise - because of COVID 19. It’s still there, for both Alicia and myself. We hope to return in the near future. Please do read on.

I’m working on the very beginnings of a new project in collaboration with Dr Alicia Kent at King’s College, London. I’ve known Alicia since we met at a conference she co-organised on Anna Freud back in 2017. We have lots of mutual interests and I am really keen to be working with someone outside my usual field, arts and health. In 2018 we collaborated on workshops for ‘Language Acts and World Making‘ and Alicia joined me to walk from Littleborough to Howarth for ‘Sometimes all you can do is Walk’.

We are lucky to be funded by the Arts and Intelligence programme at King’s Cultural Community following our application advocating emotional intelligence founded on soft handling - an investigation of archive material founded on textile methodologies and techniques. Unfolding engages with Anna Freud’s archive. Freud was a pioneer of child analysis whose transformational methodology placed observation before theory. Her focus was emotional intelligence in action. Freud was also a weaver and knitter. Unfolding proposes a dialogue between two disciplines – textiles and psychoanalysis - towards a re-reading of a third, the archive. Unfolding is illuminatory. It will apply textile methodologies to the archive, all likely to have been embodied in Freud’s own practice – and will apply revelatory discoveries to the making of new artefacts to support an in-practice pedagogy valorising looking and sensing, where material unfolding becomes expansive.

This feels (appropriately) like a progression out of earlier work and interests, always my preoccupation with the literal and metaphoric language of textiles. It’s early days, I’m currently processing thoughts about seams and seaming, let’s see how that goes.