iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

My paper at the recent Psyart Conference at the University of Essex: "The Sublimated Hand: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Gesture in Media Representations of Institutional Child Abuse"

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Marlow Moss: female contemporary of Mondrian, largely unrecognised despite being acknowledged as an influence.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

What's with all the fake accounts starting to appear???

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

AI old people and leather. Skin generated by semi-conductors, buffed, oiled and grissailled, and the life well lived reflected in sweat shop bags. It's time for a well-earned rest and a reshaping of the sublime.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

19th Century Blindness: Fanny Crosby hymn writer. "If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things about me."

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

"Catholics believe that, at the moment of ordination, an ontological change occurs to the priest through which he becomes an “alter Christus” (other Christ). They also believe that every priest is ordained by bishops who are direct successors of the Apostles. Priests, therefore, are—or at least were

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

Edouard Manet's pastel sketch of the barmaid for his A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) presents an equally sombre depiction of the model. By turns, they speak to a sad, habituated routine marked by the transition from the apparel of daily life to the embellishments required for bar work in Paris.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Masud Khan's gushing description of Winnicott, "A childlike spontaneity imbued his movements. Yet he could be so still, so very inheld and still. I have not met another analyst who was more inevitably himself. It was this quality of his inviolable me-ness that enabled him to be so many persons...

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Not paintings as such. Sections of tables used by students in the RMIT MFA program.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I have started researching for a paper about the trope of hands, and in particular clasped hands, in media reports about institutional child sex abuse. The images invariably isolate the hands from the body. There are so many layers of meaning: historical, psychological and political.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

A series of watercolours I made based on photographs in my school yearbook. I attended a Catholic boarding school. Many of the staff were either convicted of child sex abuse or exiled to Pacific islands to escape conviction. The multiple eyes relate to the all-seeing Salesian 'preventive' system.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Celebrating the life and work of French artist Bernard Buffet (1928-1999)

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

A social note: my mother turns 104 today. Still going strong.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Winnicott has stated: 'In psycho-analysis as we know it there is no trauma that is outside the individual's omnipotence.' But I would add that omnipotence is not mastery; in it there is a tremendous denial of both inner and outer psychic reality, ... (Masud Khan, Hidden Selves)

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

David Wojnarowicz: "Globe of the United States" at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Arrived in the mail yesterday. Italian monumental cemeteries are one of my passions.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Pavel Smarov's (Paul Chmaroff) ' Journey on the Champ Elysees' from 1902. The insouciance of the mother preoccupied by her thoughts and the daughter who has reached the age where she realizes her family's place in the world, is all captured in a momentary glimpse as their carriage goes past.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

The affective impact of seeing the art of children responding to trauma can be overwhelming. These are tiles assembled along the pier of Jindo island in South Korea, close to the location of the 2014 Sewol ferry tragedy that took the lives of 250 children from the same high school.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

I recently purchased a secondhand copy of Thomas Ogden's classic 'The Primitive Edge of Experience'. I love this copy - besides the contents, it displays the physical traces and curiosity of the previous owner. It feels like buying an old paintbrush that still has traces of pigment in the bristles.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Why do we often associate traumatic experience with darkness? I visited Auschwitz in the height of Summer. The grass was so thick, it was laborious to walk through. Swallows circled in the sky and the willows swayed in the gentle breeze. When it operated, Auschwitz never stopped for a Summer break.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Few tourists visit the Verano cemetery in Rome. The Verano features extraordinary monument paintings by the artist Filippo Severati who worked in the 1870s and 1880s. His practice involved painting on a mix using lava. Several have lasted for 150 years.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

Donald Kalsched's 'Trauma, innocence and the core complex of dissociation', a journal article that left a strong impression. #psychoanalysis #dissociation #trauma #csa

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

A work I completed several years ago. Artists who work around the theme of the lived experience of trauma might get this. You open any page of a Louise Bourgeois monograph and you know that she has been there -artistically - before you have.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

The poster featuring my watercolours for the Stigma: Dismantled, Revealed exhibition at the Dax Centre in 2019. The small paintings were fixed to blank pages from 1970s photo albums, a tactile and visual reminder of past traumatic experience.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

The A,B,C and D of Boarding School Syndrome: Abandonment, Bereavement, Captivity and Dissociation. 'Home' is never home again. Add sexual and physical abuse to the mix and the complex trauma that follows is almost impossible to disentangle.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Rene de Saint-Marceaux's First Communion of 1893 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. A young girl at the moment she receives the communion bread experiencing a deep and anticipated moment of spiritual connection. An extraordinary work.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's 1889 painting 'Memory of Sorrow (Portrait of Santina Negri) The artist painted this work as a response to the death of his sister and it is interesting that he chose to project his pain at her loss on the figure of a female model.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Wilfred Bion's early years are marked by trauma. As a child, he experiences the separation from his family in India and the captivity of boarding school life in England. This is followed by the horrific experience of war and carnage as a commander of a Mark IV tank in the First World War.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Photographs of tomatoes in a Sevilla market about five years back. I envy the range of fruit and vegetables people can choose from in countries like Spain.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Blinman cemetery, South Australia in the late afternoon - a remote location on the edge of the desert, known for its abandoned copper mine. Too small and far away for doctors to attend to mining accidents and young women dying in childbirth. Several of the graves are constructed from local stone.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

I would have liked to have seen the Psychic Wounds: on Art and Trauma exhibition at the Warehouse in Dallas. I have the 408-page catalogue; it is beautifully arranged with excellent contributions from Robert Storr, Griselda Pollock and Hal Foster, et al. Highly recommended.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

My photographs of a memorial in the Certosa cemetery in Bologna, an illustration of the "my childhood ended...' trope where the abrupt traumatic event speeds up areas of development. Through the death of the father, the young man literally takes on the role of wearing the pants in the family.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Theodore Gericault's “Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy ” 1822 is one of the lasting legacies of 19th century Alienism. Every brushstroke, every nuance, every part of that face represents monomaniacal obsession. I wish my photos could have captured the finer details of those eyes.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

My boarding school was described as "The Hell House" and "The Mansion of Pure Evil" in newspaper articles. Th earlier image shows the mansion when it was the hub of Melbourne society. When I attended the school the beautiful Victorian greenhouse (centre) was in the final stages of neglect.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Celebrating the neglected French naif painter Camille Bombois (1883-1970). There is so much freedom about his choice of compositions and his approach to colour. Part of his background was working as a circus strongman. #arthistory #artbrut #outsiderart #naiveart #painting #art

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

These images are from a series I did several years ago called 'Youth Pastors'. There are many more. I am not sure where they fit in to the canon of art history, or how they contribute to cultural discourse. Julia Kristen comes to mind.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

When Freud was very young and living in Pribor, his Catholic nanny would take him to the local churches several times per week. These are my photographs of the alternate routes they might have taken (both 300 steps from the Freud house), and the interior of the Church of the nativity of the Virgin.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Elizabeth Severn, Martha Harris, Esther Bick, and Ursula Longstaff Bowlby, significant women in psychoanalysis. I like how Severn discovered her calling talking to people as she sold them encyclopaedias door-to-door, and began her practice as “Elizabeth Severn, Metaphysician,” in a Texas hotel room.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

In the summer months, the grave of Freud's parents in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof is difficult to locate and once there you must negotiate the stinging nettles that smother the surrounding graves. Some of the cemetery workers (pictured) kindly found the grave for me using the cemetery grid numbers.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

A family photograph from the 1960s. Recently I came across this painting: The Vanishing Forest, painted by Arthur Streeton in 1934. Both are in the same location. I think that my father's sense of strict order in his photographs were a response to the deep sense of disorder he experienced in WW2.

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

One of my favourite book purchases in the last few years. I bought this in an art book store in Prague. Anna Zemankova was preoccupied with creating her own botanical world. Art brut, Outsider art...whatever you like to call it. I find her work deeply satisfying. #arthistory #artbrut #outsiderart

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Fun with placemats. My own take on dissociation, consciousness and identity. I suppose, in some ways, this binary applies to chickens as well. I created these artworks at the beginning of my PhD studies using objects I found in a thrift store. #psychoanalyis #art #dissociation #chickens #identity

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Morphic resonance: Wassily Kandinsky Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles 1913 Australian indigenous artist Dadda Samson Untitled c2015 #arthistory #art #painting

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Dr Simon Crosbie @simon-books-art.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

One way to understand the cult-like following of Trump is to read Jung's short 1946 essay "Introduction: the fight with the shadow". "...the psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual". more quotes that might resonate below...

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