The word “uncanny” has been used throughout history to describe a certain unsettling feeling one may feel upon encountering something. What may it refer to, both now and in the past?
Since being coined somewhere around the late 16th century in Scots to mean “relating to the occult, malicious,” the word “uncanny” has taken up many meanings. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud wrote a piece of text (“The Uncanny”) that attempted to analyse what exactly constituted uncanniness.
In particular, his view is that a situation or encounter is uncanny due to an inherent familiarity of it — that one has encountered this situation before, albeit possibly under wildly different circumstances. The term 'uncanny valley' is also applied to artworks and animation or video games that reproduce places and people so closely that they create a similar eerie feeling. Artists, including some associated with the surrealist movement, drew on this description and made artworks that combined familiar things in unexpected ways to create uncanny feelings.
Artist name: Rachel Letchford
Description: My current practice revolves around the making and photographing of a series of small objects - using my kitchen sink to make casts and a DIY, home studio to stage and record images. Cast in a variety of materials from concrete to clay, latex to wax my objects are often deformed or distorted through the process of their production. My objects act as traces or impressions of specific and often familiar forms. In the series The Punctums, for example, a vintage Murano glass Bambi has been represented as a molten lump, and a baby elephant as a broken stony thing. Ornaments that were once treasured are now cast aside, and are refigured as uncanny reminders, visitors from the past. By photographing my objects, or presenting them as moving images, I aim to control the way they are seen. This second level of re-presentation enables certain details to be exposed and specific tensions within the image revealed. In the contrast between areas of light and shadow for example, I attempt to deepen the object's melancholic and unnerving qualities, and when they are presented using a GIF, they become animated, alive. This can be seen in 'Rachel' a Royal Daulton figurine, cast in concrete and spinning in the dark, perhaps caught in an eternal search for something lost or unknown and 'Milking It', a latex mould that throbs for forgiveness. The Photograph itself acts as a record, an index of something that has been. My photographs and GIF’s are traces of objects recast - this doubling process gives them a new, singular existence of their own.
Website: www.rachelletchford.com
Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/rachelletchford/
Artist name: Charmagne Coble
Description: ‘Trace’ was a turning point for me, I had finally opened up to one of the most sensitive events in my life through art – the death of my father. For a year I worked on studying and researching into absence through poetry, philosophy, sculpture and photography. I had always struggled to express this traumatic event I witnessed, unable to express my self through words I let my art speak for me.
Website: www.charmagnecoble.com
Instagram account: @Coblefinearts
Artist name: Eddie Saint-Jean
Description: All my work is influenced by Freudian theories of the Uncanny, so this work Uncanny4 is one in a series on the masking of the self. False smiles, false greetings, false online personas - all of which have grown considerably over the past few years during the digital revolution - and particularly during the pandemic.
Website: https://slipstreammediauk.com/artisteddiesaintjean/
Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/esaintjean1/
Artist name: Brigid Vidler
Description: Spider Crabs have undergone a rebrand in the UK to make them more palatable. Images of the newly coronated King Cornish Crab confused my mind. Is giving something you eat a human name more attractive?
As I was carving the arms and legs of this work, the shell, which I had collected from a beach 6 months earlier was sitting in the sun. It cracked for no reason. Maybe is was the sun, maybe it was the thought of being rebranded to be consumed.
Website: www.brigidvidler.com
Instagram: @bid_vid
Artist name: Jenny Seabrook
Description: Freud wrote that the uncanny occupies the liminal space between the conscious and unconscious mind where the familiar and unfamiliar meet within the subjective experience of the individual. Here, found pottery fragments spill from an oversized ceramic mouth sculpture, like teeth in an anxiety dream - echoing themes of fragility and brokenness. The surreal image is juxtaposed against a backdrop of domesticity, presented on a bed in a space lined with vintage wallpaper.
Website: jenny.seabrook.co.uk
Instagram: @jen_sketches
Artist name: Jacob Weeks
Description: Who we are? Where we are going? And why?
This is a personal project and journey investigating what happens after we die? This series explores the journey of the body and the uncanny spaces of the chapels of rest that we will end up in. The work i hope will open up the taboo surrounding death , and push the viewer into spaces where they wouldn’t ideally choose to be. After death all of our bodies go through similar journeys but I wanted to see some of these journeys for myself. From the start of this body of work, I hit a few hurdles to begin with, as a lot of funeral directors wouldn’t allow me in because in their words: they are ‘private spaces’. But how can I not visit a place that I might end up in?
Website: www.jacobweeks.com
Instagram: @jacobweeksphoto
Artist name: Josh Azzarella
Description: In a critical viewing of Alfred Hitchcock's film "The Birds" (1963), the viewer can identify multiple configurations of the jungle gym situated outside of the Bodega Bay School. This work is an amalgamation of those configurations. The jungle gym has a familiar presence while simultaneously projecting uncertainty and disquiet. Within my research and practice this work constitutes a further investigation into the physical manifestations of interstitial spaces.
Website: joshazzarella.com
Instagram account: @azzarellastudio
Artists: Emily Robards
Description 'Reach,' 2021. Mixed-media sculpture, (goose egg, Porcelain, and polymer clay). A Metamorphosis, altering the reality through the uncanny, drawing attention to underlying resentments and turmoil’s through a nonsensical and appalling transformation of nature. In his essay The Uncanny (1919), Freud writes about how the uncanny is associated with the bringing to light of what was hidden and secret, distinguishing the uncanny from the simply fearful by defining it as "that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar." The unseen figure reaching out of the egg. Reaching out of Its familiar space into the unknown. A body transforming. The most difficult obstacle I had to overcome when making this piece was removing the yoke from the goose egg, and making a hole for the arm big enough without the shell cracking. this is actually the second egg I used, as the first cracked under the pressure..
Web-site: http://emilyrobards.com
Instagram: @emily_robards_artist
Artist name: Janet Griffiths
Description: This performed photowork was made by subverting the normal response made by a woman coming across a spider in her bathroom. I subverted this by becoming the spider myself, making the costume and then photoshopping off my legs. I took the photowork with a self-timer on my camera.
Website: www.janetgriffithsart.co.uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janetgriffithsart/
Artist name: Daisy Richardson
Description: I made this painting from memory and invention of a semi-collapsed building I saw while walking in the Southern Hebrides a few years ago. There wasn't much of the roof left but relatively new electrical goods and other household items were scattered around the floor. There was no sign of a fire or anything that had obviously caused the disaster. I keep returning to this place in my mind and work, drawn in by the still tangible human presence and the unknown events that led to the house's ruination. It seems almost post-apocalyptic - prosaic but profound; familiar but not familiar; uncanny while also being very ordinary.
Website: http://www.daisyrichardson.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daisymayarichardson/
Artist name: Alexis Leanne
Description: My work loiters outside reality, conversing with the subconscious and the surreal. I create characters from my hypnagogic hallucinations, using non-traditional techniques resulting in objects that evoke an eerie feeling.
Instagram: @alexisleanne.83
Artist name: Abi Lewis
Description: In my mind there is a cabinet of curiosities containing all manner of oddities, including the Hand of Glory. I don't have a physical wunderkammer, but use illustration to add to my imagined room of wonder. Using the simplicity of MS Paint to remove the objects from my brain and make the items 'real' is something I get obsessed over.
Website: www.abi-lewis.weebly.com
Instagram: @i.am.abi.art
Artist name: Gabriela Dumitrescu
Description: EXILE - The Preparation - Undercurrent (video):
“Undercurrent” is a piece from my Doina cycle “EXILE”. To me, "exile" does not only mean a geographic distance from home. Also and foremost the word denotes to me an emotion, a condition of being separated from something essential and, always connected to that, a yearning for wholeness. In this sense, most people probably live a life in exile, at least temporarily. The inner trembling originating from this condition, the insecurities, the blurriness, the angularity, the vagueness, the uncanny, the secret and the magical interest me. I dive into that blurred space of the improvised in my Doinas.
Website: gabrieladumitrescu.com
Instagram: @gd.collages.berlin
Artist name: Eleanor Bedlow
Description: It is not quite a plant and not quite an animal. The extensions/limbs are abruptly severed at the same point. The sculptures I make often do not have a right side up until near the end of the making process.
Website: http://www.elbedlow.co.uk/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eleanorbedlow/
Artist name: Tim Veness
Description: My work seeks to reveal aspects of the inner mind and how trauma can be perceived externally. Inspired by Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' (1919) my practice considers repressed anxieties and mental health issues. To convey a sense of un-real narrative, dread and menace clouding perceptions of reality. This piece 'Shore of the Drowning Mind' was inspired by a personal struggle and the experiences of those suffering from similar mental states.
Website: www.timvenessphotography.com
Instagram: @timotheusnoir
Artist name: Michaela Wheater
Description: Dolls are a powerful metaphor for the self: Our experiences and our relationships. This image is from an ongoing series of prints affectionately called 'boxed beauties' which are based on preloved dolls photographed for sale on eBay. These prints capitalise on ambiguity: They reflect a dark humour that plays on the viewer’s emotions, associations and experiences.
Website: www.michaelawheater.co.uk
Instagram: @michaela.wheater
Artist name: Morwenna Lake
Description: The practice of shamanism, which we have all but lost, was a way of connecting with a spiritual world in order to guide, help and heal an individual/community. I made 'Unholy Crown' as a tribute to the deep connection of other peoples and even our ancestors felt to nature which we lack in Western Europe. To make the crown 'uncanny', it had to to be different from other shamanic objects I had seen in collections, it had to present or create with the viewer an oddness as to purpose which many of these objects contain, which make them difficult to understand.
Website: https://www.morwennalake.com
Instagram: @morwennalakestudio
Artist name: Rachael Rutherford
Description: At the time of making this work, I was considering how the uncanny is applied to feminine bodies, how they 'lack' but then are feared for their capacity for creation, and so considered if the stomach had these egg-like growths, how would change the female body, as their power is on show in a way that sits between beauty and grotesque, to celebrate a monstrous woman.
Website: https://rachaelrutherford.wixsite.com/rachaelrutherfordart/home-2
Instagram: @rachaelrutherford_art
Artist name: Elizabeth Hindle
Description: "Upbringing" is a digital collage composed out of a found vintage photograph. The piece explores a narrative of identity within the concept of childhood, and the blurring of our own Self with the egos of our parents. Thus, the Uncanny is awakened when we start to look into a mirror and see our parents quietly peering back at us.
Website: www.elizabethhindle.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arthindle1989/
Artist name: Tyler Wilson
Description: People use the word 'uncanny' to describe something that is so disturbing but so right. I made this to show the uncanniness of how I co-exist with spaces but causing a disruption to overall functionality based on how people treat me as a homosexual man. In this I had overcome my anxiety of being seen or unseen.
Instagram: @theunenrolledwilson
Artist name: Ruth Fuller
Description: This painting is a re-thinking of an old family photograph, looking back at it from the future, with the knowledge of the way time and events unfolded since it was taken. The work is one of a series of paintings in which thoughts have crept into images in the form of creatures or unexpected interruptions. In this way, the old photographs have become entirely reimagined and fictionalised. The notion of the uncanny is inherent in the work through unsettling and unreal scenes. They are open to interpretation from the viewer, but on a personal level they are, in part, a melancholy reflection of lives blighted by the development of Schizophrenia in a family member. They are painted on a small scale to demonstrate a glimpse of the private and personal that viewers see. It was difficult to create a sense of the uncanny in these paintings without making them seem overly menacing or threatening, which wasn't the intention. The aim was to create a sense of otherworldliness in the everyday, so that something uncomfortable emerges.
Website: www.ruthfuller.weebly.com
Instagram: @ruthstephaniefuller
Artist name: Samuel Joshua Richardson
Description: Interrupting the performance of sleep, this piece is just that, a performance. However, this does not change the fact that this piece is also, a photo. Presented in the form of digital documentation, the performance appears as a past event, however it continues in its journey still. A time-lapse video consisting of 2469 pictures, one took every ten seconds, documents the photographic paper lying on a bed with a body on top and a light facing them from above. Digital photos of the paper were also taken with each interruption of sleep and days after the initiation. Sleeping was challenging with the disturbance of the cold, hard paper on the skin, without a quilt, under a UV light and with the constant thought that I was being watched by a camera, that I was performing. The act of recording one’s self is a phenomena of mass proportion as the smartphone screen is integral to the western consumer. With the popular ‘Selfie’, an experience is reduced into a small moment of time and through lessening the exposure by fragmenting and refracting light, an understandable representation is created. Using an experimental analogue process, spread over the course of one night’s sleep, the paper is exposed to a multitude of moments flooded with light which in turn reduces the figuration of the representation. By removing the pinhole and not fixing the paper, the boundaries to which one perceives a photo is questioned. The result is an ambiguous work which parallels the unquantifiable experience of sleeping. Though the piece is not fixed, its permanence is questionable, as it continues to change with daily exposure to light and thus, a trace of what once was is left behind, a reminder of its physical state as a finite substance; but the presence of what is, continues the papers performance.
Instagram: @samueljoshuarichardson
Artist name: Julia Watson
Description: Pacing through my memories and choices, I stopped short on the threshold of each tangent. Spurred on by The Weird and The Eerie to pursue the meeting of aesthetics within the uncanny, I created a drawing 4.7m in length to struggle with the enormity of the answer to where next in my life, as my past met my present. I frequently got lost in the scale, overwhelmed by the outcome.
Website: https://www.juliawatsonart.com/
Instagram: @julezwatson
