Abstract
This chapter will consider the intersection of discourses around motherhood and space in the work of four contemporary female installation artists: Rachel Whiteread, Jessica Stockholder, Tacita Dean, and Louise Bourgeois. Their work references domestic and interior spaces and their associations with the maternal body and the uncanny. Freud’s original essay on The Uncanny, published in 1919, developed ideas about the fear generated by the familiar becoming unfamiliar.1 Amongst the examples of the uncanny discussed by Freud, the double, the haunted house, and the maternal womb are relevant to this discussion. The correspondence between the maternal body and the house have been further explored by feminist psychoanalytic writers like Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed, whose arguments will be drawn on here.
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Notes
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 124.
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art (London: Roudedge, 1988), 54–63.
Anthony Vidier, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 27–37.
For quotation, see Freud, The Uncanny, 124, elaborated in Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993), 53.
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws (London: BFI, 1992), 18.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated from French by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 5–7, 79.
Charlotte Mullins, Rachel Whiteread (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), sections 1 and 2.
Michael Archer, “Ghost Meat,” Artscribe 87 (1991), 35–38.
Barry Schwabsky, Lynne Tillman, and Lynne Cooke, Jessica Stockholder (London: Phaidon, 1995), 35.
Mela Davila and Roland Groenenboom, Tacita Dean (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Actar, 2001), 52.
Julia Kristeva, “About Time,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 190–192.
Fred Botting, Gothic (New York: Routledge, 1996), esp.11.
Roger Dadoun, “Fetishism in the horror film,” in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald, 53–54 (London: BFI, 1989), quoted in Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 20.
Marina Warner, Louise Bourgeois (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 12.
Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father (London: Violette, 1998), 321.
Mieke Bal, “Narrative inside out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999), 109.
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© 2005 Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer
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Carson, F. (2005). Uneasy Spaces: The Domestic Uncanny in Contemporary Installation Art. In: Hardy, S., Wiedmer, C. (eds) Motherhood and Space. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12103-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12103-5_14
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