Ana Čvorović

Fog 



Solo exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, 2024. 

Curated by Sacha Craddock and commissioned by FREEPSY as part of the Psychoanalysis and Radical Psychiatry conference.



Čvorović’s sculpture releases the power of association in the way it manages to play with suggestions of comfort as well as discomfort. By using a strange, distorted hint at precarity, the artist manages to construct, and combine, an inevitable mixture of fact and fiction. With elements scaled up and down, with the delight of display alluding to gain, as well as ultimate loss, Čvorović points out, however, and yet ultimately withholds, any sense of full explanation. The work hints at the way that the material fact imbedded in a found object, for instance, is folded in with the typical struggle between value and non-value that sculpture will inevitably carry.

Čvorović makes, or suggests, a world within a world that embraces, but then runs away from, any sense of normality. Insisting that as an artist her emphasis is on the outsider, outlander, and outcast, the work can be seen as it were,


Copyright Sacha Craddock

October 2024

from the edge of a metaphor without walls. The gaze, which is often inwards, often comes from positions of height, reality, and gravity. The apparently fragile work, however, plays with the unconscious relationship between function and pretense.  The fiction, but soon fact, of a manufactured detail, for instance, a fragment of apparent use manufactured repeatedly by the artist, can be sometimes placed near a small painting of horizon and place.  The artist evokes a comprehension of place, a change of scale, all somehow, drawn towards the domestic interior. The inside, seen from outside, alludes perhaps, to a shift in physical and mental understanding. By employing a mimicry that parallels life lived, as well as art experienced, Čvorović always manages to insist that such a range of possibility remains free.  


Tower I, 2024
Plaster, resin, threaded rod, glass test tubes, medical vacuum cups, fishing floats, child bed sheet, foam, metal u bolt, child swimsuit, meat mincer plate, crochet doily, glassware, bungee cord, metal wheel.
W60 x D60 x H114cm
Tower II, 2024
Plaster, resin, threaded rod, glass test tubes, medical vacuum cup, duvet, fabric, foam, metal u bolts, child swimsuit, crochet doily, glassware, bungee cord, meat mincer plate, glass globe, lifting eye bolt.
W60 x D60 x H114cm
Tower III, 2024
Plaster, resin, threaded rod, medical vacuum cup, child bed sheet, duvet, foam, roofing hook, child swimsuit, crochet doily, glassware, foam, meat grinder blade, meat mincer plate, glass globe, fishing weights, jesmonite, dye.
W60 x D60 x H114cm



Lunula, 2024
Jesmomnite, child's dress, nuts, bolts, meat mincer plate, meat grinder blade, glass, child swimsuit.
W88 x D 60 x H26cm
Child’s Duvet, 2024
Jesmonite, blue dye, child’s duvet, plaster, steel, nuts and bolts. 
W74 x D44 x H112cm
Dual Conduit, 2024.
Threaded rods, plaster, mesh, foam, fabric, fishing floats, u-bolt, glass globe.
W56 x D47 x H36cm
Suspended Time, 2024.
Threaded rods, plaster, resin, clock part, dental retainer, foam, fabric, d-shackles, fishing floats, wire rope.
W57 x D29 x H42cm
High State, 2024
Threaded rods, plaster, bolts, nuts, jesmonite, dye, fishing floats, glass, wire mesh, cable ties, wing nuts, enamel, foam.
W37 x D37 x H40
The Gatekeeper, 2023
Threaded rods, plaster, clear tarpaulin, wire rope, bolts, nuts, fishing floats, glass, child swimsuit, crochet, foam, vinyl.
W37 x D37 x H40cm


The sculptures in Fog emerged as fragile towers, assemblages of glass, nuts and bolts, plaster and fabric, miniature mattresses, and children’s clothing. They stood as precarious structures, neither entirely rooms nor fully dissolving into abstraction – holding within them traces of childhood, displacement, and dream. The towers, with their layering and fragmented formations, made me think of a multiplicity of lives. Each composition was a site of passage, a movement between temporalities, an entry and exit through past, present, and future.

Memory itself is fragmented – scattered across time and space, reshaped by recollection and loss. In Fog, I placed objects together as if by free association, not unlike the fluid, unplanned nature of psychoanalytic work. The sculptural process, for me, is always improvised: an intuitive layering, a response to material and form, a dialogue between the previous life of an object and my own. This same principle of improvisation is present in the history of free psychoanalytic clinics, where necessity and adaptation dictate new ways of care. These clinics are spaces where walls are broken down – socially, institutionally, and psychically – to create something alternative, something open.

The towers in Fog evolved from a single cube: a small child’s mattress in the middle of a plane. This cube then expanded outward, generating more mattresses, then walls, then spaces that resembled rooms or compartments. These eventually started to disintegrate, losing their enclosures and progressively giving way to open towers – spaces without walls. I see this progression as parallel to the work of free clinics, which grows through collaboration, adaptability, and the breakdown of rigid institutional structures. They form networks of support, just like the components in Fog held, pushed and pulled one another. The objects, in their fragile arrangements, leaned into one another for balance – each element offering both weight and support, in an ongoing negotiation of space.

This is another chance to think of precarity as generative. Just as the objects in Fog repurposed themselves, taking on new functions within their unstable towers, free clinics operate through improvisation, creating structures that are sustained not despite precarity but through it. As Raluca




Ana Čvorović, February 2025
Soreanu and Anna Minozzo tell us in their recent article On the Mental Health Commons, these clinics exist within shifting terrains, continually reconstructing themselves in response to socio-political realities. They are self-sustaining but fragile, like the towers of Fog, which grew not as stable monoliths but as contingent, responsive structures.

Fog
points to both material and psychological states – a condition of disorientation, of seeing and unseeing, of moving through uncertainty. Fog reveals and obscures, forming a space where perception is fluid. The ‘lunatic’ has historically been cast as lost in the fog of their own mind, wandering through blurred layers of memory and consciousness. Yet this fog is also a site of potential – a realm where associations emerge freely, where structures can form and dissolve, where new constellations of meaning take shape.

In Farewell to My Yellow House, István Hollós describes the displacement and estrangement of those deemed mad, their lives existing at the margins of visibility. ‘Amid the stillness and quiet of its surroundings, the house with the eternal monotonous rumble takes refuge like a fearsome secret…’ Free clinics sought to create spaces of care within this fog, to make visible and give form to what had been obscured. With the forming of Fog as an exhibition, I engaged with similar notions: what is hidden, what is seen, and how objects, like histories, can be assembled into new configurations.

Fog was a meditation on unseen infrastructures of care and the ways in which fragility and resilience coexist. Through its precarious towers, it gestured toward the improvisational nature of psychoanalytic work and the ways in which alternative worlds are continually constructed from the ruins of existing ones. As free clinics emerge through collaboration and mutual care, it feels fitting that my next work will also be a collaborative effort – bringing together multiple voices to form another precarious but hopefully generative formation, continuously evolving within shifting ground.