Psyche for Sore Eyes
Alice Inggs, World of Interiors
February 2025
‘We have a perfect name for fantasy realised. It’s called nightmare,’ said contemporary philosophy’s rebel luminary Slavoj Zižek in one of his pithier pronouncements. Distance from the real – the suggested antidote to this problem – is foundational to Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley, a surreal-heavy show at Alison Jacques gallery. For its curator, Daniel Malarkey – a name that adds a frisson of determinism to the fabulist theme – his work is ‘always about the collective unconscious’.
Originally premised on folk stories, Manderley took on a new, uncanny meaning during the curation process and the show’s naming. ‘I realised my subconscious had been curating an exhibition about my favourite book from adolescence, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier’, says Malarkey, who sees the narrative, with its moral ambiguity and heroine’s journey, as fitting the archetype of a Gothic fairy story. […]