Once More with Feeling. This work responds to the condition known as ‘hysteria’, as written about by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in 1896. Revisiting the stories of Freud’s patients who came to see him in his home in Vienna until he was exiled to London in 1939 this image-text project seeks to reconsider the voices of those people, mostly women, who were experiencing psychological suffering and strange symptoms in their bodies. Freud came to see that these symptoms were rooted in repression, often due to a societal imposition (hostility towards homosexuality for example, or a lack of education for women) combined with a psychological disposition or trauma. This work wonders which voices are dismissed today? Who considers the role of dismissed voices today? What do these voices have to say? And how can we use photography as an act of listening?

I have taken extracts from Freud’s Case Studies in Hysteria and extracts from fictional characters such as Madame Bovary, who may have been experiencing a similar affliction, and used them alongside storytelling and evocative photographic imagery as a means to make this historical work resonant today. This image-text work is part of a wider interdisciplinary body of work that includes video, performance, writing and publications and is ongoing in that each iteration of the work is displayed differently according to the venue and context. If you are a curator and would like to discuss how this work could be configured to a particular venue please feel free to get in touch.