From April 15th to June 5th, the French-British artist, Alice Anderson, will show one of her site-specific sculptures at the Freud Museum in London. This intriguing piece involves the museum being wrapped and binded in thousands of metres of red dolls hair, which have been spun from huge bobbins. Her work is influenced by her North African upbringing, creating sculptures, architectures and films based on fictional childhood memories. She uses the phrase ‘architectures’ to describe these site-specific sculptures and equates the circular shapes with anxiety and enclosure, which are rooted in her childhood. The location of the exhibition is what I find so intriguing, the artwork has an fascinating psychological meaning and reveals something about the artist’s past. The wrapped building evokes confinement and constraint. The significance of the colour of the hair is in memories of her own family, namely her father, who she inherited her red hair from, and who left the family when she was just a toddler.
“I remember the terrible fears I used to have when I was a child left alone at home for many long hours waiting for the return of my mother. At that time I invented rituals for myself to calm my anxieties. These rituals consisted of undoing the thread from seams and I wound these threads around parts of my body and other objects. This obsession became so bad that I started to do the same thing using my hair.”
