Patricia Townsend

Patricia Townsend is an artist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and was formerly Consultant Psychotherapist at St George’s Hospital Eating Disorders Service. As an artist she works with video, photography and installation and is interested in the interface between the external world and the internal world of the imagination. Much of her work explores our emotional relationship with landscape – the ways in which landscape can affect us and the stories we construct by projecting our own beliefs, expectations and desires onto our surroundings.

Patricia’s video pieces have been shown internationally in gallery exhibitions and film and video screenings. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Fotofest, Houston, Texas; Leeds International Film Festival; BBC Big Screen, Manchester; Pocket Film Festival, Paris; The Dock Museum, Barrow-in-Furness; Tullie House, Carlisle. Her photography and installation works have been exhibited widely, including at Huddersfield Art Gallery; Herefordshire Photography Festival; Newlyn Orion Gallery; Standpoint Gallery, London; The National Museum of Photography, Bradford. In Autumn 2013 she had a solo exhibition, supported by an Arts Council award, in the Blue Gallery at Brantwood, Coniston.

She has given papers at a number of conferences and symposia. These include ‘Land/Water and Surface’ at the University of Plymouth, ‘Sedition’ at Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle and ‘Imagining Imagination’ at the Royal College of Art. She has also published papers and book chapters related to artistic process.

She has recently guest edited a special edition of the journal Free Associations on Psychoanalysis and Artistic Process. This is now online at http://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa/issue/view/8

Patricia gained an MA Photography (distinction) at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, in 2003. She is currently a PhD student at the Slade School of Fine Art where she is studying the creative process of visual artists.