In the poem written to accompany his painting the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Salvador Dalí wrote,
‘if a man has a bulb in his head, it might break out into a flower at any minute, Narcissus!’
Earlier in the poem, Dalí had compared a ‘bulb in the head’ to the psychoanalytic notion of a ‘complex’. The flower which appears from the bulb (the egg in Dalí’s painting, which is gently balanced between the artist’s fingers) represents the artwork breaking out of the complex.
This replica of a bronze piece from Freud’s collection bears a remarkable similarity to the artist’s hand in Dalí’s painting, while the snake coiled around the wrist and running up the thumb seems to prefigure the psychoanalytic notion that the artist must somehow plumb the depths of their own unconscious sexual fantasies in the act of artistic creation.
Ceramic
Height: 13cm
Base diameter: 4.5cm
Packed in a cotton gift bag
All busts are individually made and will vary slightly.
Martha Todd RCA MA is an artist working from her studio in North London. Her work is often conceptual and normally involves sculpting figurative forms, both human and animal. She makes work for exhibitions and on commission.
