On the Other Side of the Partition, I Suddenly Remember (2019)

Projected illustrations, digital poetic texts, chaise longue, red velvet curtains.

This installation piece offers the viewer an immersive encounter with psychoanalytic ideas around meaning-making and narrative through projections of enigmatic images.

The installation uses a psychoanalytic approach to illustration to explore the relationship between image and text, drawing on theory from Freud and Lacan, particularly using ideas relating to the unconscious, the dream work and a Lacanian approach to speech and language.

The viewer is invited to ‘lie down on the couch’, and in doing so, their habitual mode of interacting with an artwork or exhibition is disrupted, as they take up a posture of recumbence.

The installation has been previously exhibited in test-format at KARST contemporary art gallery, Plymouth and also in a group MA show at Plymouth College of Art in September 2019. In November 2019 the work was partially exhibited (without the couch) at the 10th International Illustration Research Symposium at the University of Worcester, UK.

The piece was awarded the Principal’s Commendation from Plymouth College of Art (the highest award for an MA-level piece of work).

Hannah Mumby is an artist/illustrator whose work is informed by psychoanalytic theory and technique. Her illustrations and installation pieces attempt to undo the process of narrative meaning-making and push the boundaries of what illustration can offer, by questioning the nature of this communicative art form.