Unravel These Knots: One Person Exhibition at The Freud Museum, London 2016

Emma Talbot's work recounts her own real life experiences, revealing the workings of her mind in a non-linear format. Through the immediate, inventive qualities of the drawn and handmade, Talbot finds a means of registering those things that remain intangible – thoughts, memories, emotions, and psychological associations. The basis of her practice is ongoing drawing, giving a constantly developing account of her life that focuses on the thought processes that lend and narrate meaning to experience. Through the work’s proliferation of words and pictures, Talbot is able to leap back and forth in time and between memory and imagination to deliver an intimate, poetic and inventive world, charting her own psychology. Specifically, her work records pictures from the mind’s eye that can’t be captured by mechanical means, revealing idiosyncratic connective leaps and associations that underpin her personal narrative. Talbot’s work in this exhibition at the Freud Museum London is representative of the type of material that might be brought to psychoanalysis, based on family, key memories, loves, anxieties, dreams and thought patterns. Considering the open nature of psychoanalytic discourse, previously unseen drawings are installed in groups, revealing the tangled and intertwined nature of emotive subjects. The work presented in Unravel These Knots focuses on two of Freud’s studies: 'Screen Memories’ and 'The Interpretation of Dreams'. Talbot considers the potent memory of home furnishings and decoration as well as delivering an expose of her own dream images and thoughts. The work included large scale site specific painted & digital printed installations (replacing all the curtains in one of the museum's main rooms, and lining a large scale exhibition case)