Viewing Death through a Creative Lens

Freud’s 4pm Session: 16th February 2025 4.00pm-5pm

Freud Museum. 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX

Join artists Judy Goldhill and Dr. Jane Wildgoose, Keeper of the Wildgoose Memorial Library (WML), as they discuss interconnections between their creative processes, in response to the aftermath of death, across a range of media and time scales. For Judy, these are pictorial rites of mourning: where light, ghosts and translucency meld into photographic, film and book forms. For Jane, the WML is an accumulation of reference material that informs her work as an artist and writer: a constantly evolving work in progress in which she focuses on the material culture of mourning and the history of collecting.Jane and Judy are part of a peer mentoring group that meets regularly to explore common interests in the ways in which perceptions of death may interconnect with creativity.

Dr Jane Wildgoose is an artist and art historian who combines research into the history of collecting with heartfelt investigations into the material culture of mourning. Her practice based PhD (a comparative study of the collection and objectification of human skulls for museums, and the role of human hair in mourning jewellery, in late nineteenth-century London) was undertaken in the School of Art & Design History and awarded by Kingston University London in 2015.

Jane works to commission with historic collections and has exhibited at Sir John Soane’s Museum, Kensington Palace, and Waddesdon Manor in the UK and Yale Center for British Art, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at MECA, in the USA; she has also exhibited at the Crypt Gallery St Pancras and West Norwood Cemetery. Her research is published with Negative Press. 

Her current work, Seeing Truth in Museums, in collaboration with Artquest and Conway Hall, has been commissioned by the University of Connecticut and is funded by the Luce Foundation