Don’t throw out your old paint pots, your old mops, tables, pots and pans, garden spades, musical instruments, desks  or bread bins.  In fact don’t throw out anything.  With imagination, these are not redundant materials, destined for the rubbish tip, but are the raw materials for new art, giving old materials new life.

Goodbye to art shops selling paint and paintbrushes; the raw material for art is all around you: The results of Jane McAdam Freud’s two year residency at Harrow School is on show at Gazelli Art House, with its large windows overlooking Dover Street in Mayfair, and you can see links back to the school for example in the old school desk, the drawing cabinet, and the old mop used to clean the wooden floors.  What must the refined people of Mayfair think as they pass by and see all these old items recreated into art, when they are used to paintings and sculptures?  Hopefully it will open their mind to new opportunities.   What we don’t know, and would be fascinating to know, is what the school children at Harrow thought of the work and have they taken inspiration from it?

“I enjoyed working in this atmosphere of change, transforming the old and the ugly”.  Jane also has studied her namesake Sigmund’s theories and psychoanalysis and has worked in collaboration with artistic and psychoanalytical organisations across the world and you can see something of this in the work on show, where inanimate objects take on new identities and lives of their own.