Edited by Honey Luard
Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares
Text by Darian Leader

Printed by MM Artbook printing & repro, Luxembourg
260 x 190 mm, hardback
72 pages, colour illustrations throughout
ISBN 978-1-906072-90-2
Published by White Cube, 2014

399 Days marks Rachel Kneebone’s exhibition of the same name, presented at White Cube Bermondsey, London (July – September 2014). For this exhibition, Kneebone created her largest and most ambitious single installation, a monumental monochromatic sculpture comprising highly detailed porcelain tiles displaying intensely worked figurative scenarios. Musing on ‘nothingness’ through an overabundance of form and excess of detail, Kneebone negotiates several dualities in her architectonic tower: the conscious and the subconscious, the real and the imagined, the present and the absent.

An enduring record of Kneebone’s major work, the publication features extensive photography including generous details and documentation of the works’ meticulous installation. Following the sculpture’s creation over numerous studio visits, psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader provides an essay that scrutinises the work’s formal complexity and semiotic density. Considering the interplay of transformation, embodiment and discordance, Leader offers a keen reading on the energised qualities and delicacy of hand that typifies Kneebone’s making.

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst practising in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of the College of Psychoanalysts, UK. He is the author of The New Black, Strictly Bipolar, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late, Freud's Footnotes and Stealing the Mona Lisa, and co-author, with David Corfield, of Why Do People Get Ill? He is Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Human and Life Sciences, Roehampton University.