Adeline de Monseignat: interview

Dutch-Monagesque artist Adeline de Monseignat’s work is greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. For her current exhibition, Home at the Ronchini Gallery, she has created a large-scale installation exploring childhood memories

Studio International met De Monseignat in her south London studio a few weeks before her exhibition to see the work in progress and to talk about some of the ideas that inspire her.

Taking the exact measurements of the bedroom in which she grew up, she has recreated the space using the red-and-white striped awning from her family home as the walls and her old blue-and-white striped bed linen.

Nestled in the bed – which itself is surrounded by partially built walls, comprising material-wrapped bricks and oddly angled mirrors – is a family of what the artist refers to as “creaptures”. Now recognisable as De Monseignat’s motif, these glass spheres filled with vintage fur call into question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects.

Adeline de Monseignat: Home, installation view, Ronchini Gallery, London, 14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

This particular arrangement pays homage to Louise Bourgeois’s marble sculpture Cumul (1969). The installation is strangely claustrophobic, at once familiar and strange – indeed, the epitome of the uncanny.

Adeline de Monseignat: Home
Ronchini Gallery, London
14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015

Interview by Anna McNay
Filmed by Martin Kennedy

Adeline de Monseignat: Home, installation view, Ronchini Gallery, London, 14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Adeline de Monseignat: Home, installation view, Ronchini Gallery, London, 14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Adeline de Monseignat: Home, installation view, Ronchini Gallery, London, 14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015. Photo: Martin Kennedy.