“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”- Eckhart Tolle

What are the seeds of imagination? Where does an idea or creative impulse originate? Is there a successful way to translate the unconscious world into conscious reality? These are the primary questions driving my current body of work. The workings of the mind are bewildering and the limits of consciousness remain mostly undefined. I work as an observer in my own mind and document the unconscious world that I experience. These observations have led to questions about my creative process and its foundation. I am curious to know why my mind is attracted to particular imagery. I think many of my sculptures draw from archetype, defined in Jungian psychology as an inherited unconscious idea, or a common visual language. At other times, I believe the work can only be fully grokked by my imagination. Because of this, I feel my sculpture serves a dual purpose. It is both self-revelatory and self-reflective. Rendering imagination into sculptural objects gives me the opportunity to live with it in the waking world. It also gives me the opportunity to observe the viewer’s reaction to the objects. I work to translate my inner life into a record of sculptural form that will provide personal insight and resonate in the mind of the viewer.
I use dream life as a point of access into my unconscious mind. This dream world is a place with a distinct, though moveable, landscape. It is a place packed with every kind of sensation. Through the practice of lucid dreaming, I have learned to manipulate and extrapolate provocative bits of unconscious imagery. The unconscious, according to Surrealist dogma, is, “…the source of creative authenticity.” (Cheng) If this holds true, then the unconscious should be the first stop for every artist. I am surprised, inspired and sometimes frightened by what I find in the space of my head. It is hard to believe that one mind could possibly create it all. As an explanation, I am attracted to the Jungian idea of shared memory, but also believe that the potential of the brain has not been fully mapped. The challenge is to translate unconscious experience into a form that may be grasped by the conscious mind.
I aspire to, “… balance instinct with editing and imagination with logic.”(Cheng) One of the persons I admire, in regards to her capacity to maintain this balance, is the artist Kiki Smith. She shares my tendency towards the distorted figure and maintains a high level of craftsmanship. I have always admired how she is unafraid of her subject matter. Martin. E. Rosenberg, a professor at the University of Eastern Kentucky, writes in his essay, Deleuze and Guattari, Cognitive Science and Feminist Visual Arts: Kiki Smith's Bodies Without Organs Without Bodies, that:
“Kiki Smith’s juxtaposition of elegantly wrought human bodies out of technically
difficult materials…with representation of flowing menstrual blood, dangling feces
placenta, and viscera…deliberately engages contradictory mental processes:
the calm disinterest of aesthetic judgment involving standards of harmony, balance...
and appreciation of complexity and skill; the literally visceral response often felt not
by the head but by the stomach and intestines experiencing and involuntary response to
a horror, a threat.”
Smith has inspired me to push the comfort levels of my work. I do not think I am at the level where my work will cause an intestinal response, but I do wish for the viewer to be shaken by my imagery.
Thou Shalt Pow is an exhibition of work focused on the characters that I create or find in the back halls of my unconscious. These characters are persistent within the landscape of my imagination. Since I can remember, they have been, in one form or another, part of my creative life. The title of the show pays homage to one of the earliest characters to emerge from my unconscious. It was a crude, drawn stick figure with an impish personality. It broke rules and wore a dress with the word ‘Pow’ written on the front. It brazenly announced the commandment, “Thou Shalt Pow!” Later in life, it became notorious for drinking fizzy martinis and flipping people off.
In conceiving this show, I was curious to see what work might arise if I gave these characters the spotlight. Each one is a study in the grotesque/ body horror. They play on aversion to the deformed or un-natural. In one moment, they are distorted figures with nefarious, albeit humorous narratives. In another moment, they become awkward, vulnerable self-portraits.
Mewl is the first character I created for this series. Her construction was an experiment. Up until that point, I had always built a sculpture in my mind and then put it together in the real world. With Mewl, I allowed myself to work intuitively and spontaneously. Choices were made on the spot and materials were grabbed out of studio stock. Working this way resulted in a sculpture that held a certain amount of naïveté. The work of Folkert De Jong helped to inform this new process. His haphazard use of foam and pigment can look trashy in places but his control of the material results in a cohesive language of texture. It took several alterations for Mewl to feel as if she had evolved her own textural language.
I had to live with Mewl in order to see the places where she needed to change. Having Mewl in my studio has been uncomfortable: sometimes I forget she is there. Suddenly, I will see this dark, looming figure out of the corner of my eye, feel a wave of alarm, and then realize that the sculpture has gotten me yet again.
Mewl is one of the first sculptures that I have constructed with a heavy metal armature. Before the option of the metal armature, I was using reinforced paper armatures. As the size of the characters increased, it became obvious that the sculptures needed a heavier kind of support and metal solved that problem. Metal support allowed me to increase the size and weight of my materials. I think it is the height of Mewl that grounds her presence. She is a dark, human-like figure with an animal-like head. She is covered in plaster-impregnated afghans and has an empty stare. She is a character that is passive—still, but tensed for motion. She is wearing what may read as a uniform but could also read as a gothic party dress. I want the viewer to second-guess the motives of Mewl. It is not certain if she should be trusted.
The process that I discovered with Mewl was reprised in the work titled, Q and A. This work consists of two larger than life-sized figures on all fours. The first figure, Q, is larger than the second figure, A, and they have both been textured with different kinds of plaster-impregnated fabric. Q has question marks for eyes and A has exclamation points for eyes. They face each other in positions that could denote aggression or play. Unlike Mewl, this piece has a palatable sexuality. Each figure features a large, black vagina with Q sporting what could be called a ‘penis lock.’ I wanted sex to be part of the potential aggression of this piece. These animal creatures are ruled by the id, or the part of the psyche concerned with instinctive impulse. They want to fight, play or screw. Only the symbols in their eyes keep them reserved.
The motion and interaction in Q and A gives more opportunity for the creation of a narrative.
I want the viewer to feel the engagement of the two characters. In my imagination, they are two aspects of my id self. My id self is the part of my mind that seeks gratification at any cost. Q is my id of today and A is the id of my adolescence. Each character wants but they also want different things. It is not important for the viewer to understand the personal allegory in order to appreciate the stress in this sculpture.
In addition to the full figure works that I create, I also maintain a habit of busts. My work on busts has allowed me to explore some of the more poetic, complex themes to which I am attracted. For Thou Shalt Pow, I have created a triptych of busts titled, Cerebrus. These busts stand at the entrance to the gallery and guard the other works. They are sharp little mouths one can imagine snapping and snarling at anyone who dares approach. I titled them Cerebrus because I wanted to make a play on the name for the three-headed dog of Greek myth. These creatures do not act as the guards of hell but rather serve as the guardians of my own mind. They are fearsome with their hyena/ coyote mouths, and yet they are busts – stunted and veritably harmless if you keep your distance. I have also made them blind, save the coyote who has one watchful eye. This eye is also a play on the idea of the Graeae. In Greek mythology, they are three ancient sisters who symbolize dread, horror and alarm. The sisters share one eye and are usually portrayed arguing over whose turn it is to see. These characters, even though “all bark but no bite,” are specifically placed in the gallery to guard the other work. Nevertheless, they warn the viewer but also offer no resistance to the viewer’s curiosity. Cerebrus guards but does not guard well.
Bonne Merde is a sculpture of smaller scale and I used a different process for its construction. I chose to construct its head, hands and feet out of ceramic. These parts rest on a metal armature that is fleshed out with padding and suited in a recovered, harlequin-patterned quilt top. Its head is egg-shaped and it has large, glass container eyes that drip liquid onto its cheeks. The backlit eyes give the impression of an inner glow or fire. Bonne Merde has a swollen, wet mouth that is licking at a sticky, candied apple. This work means to ride the rail between delight and disgust. It is a deformed little character who sits openly enjoying its messy treat. It waves at the viewer as if greeting a friend. Its feet dangle as a child’s might. With this work, I examine my attraction to the grotesque form; the piece is a demonstration of displaced aversion. It is amusing that the mind may be both repelled and attracted to the disfigured form. Like its title, which translated into English means ‘good shit’, Bonne Merde is a contradiction. I want the viewer to initially feel repulsed by its misshapen little body, but be drawn in by the figure’s child-like gesture and expression.
Themes of the grotesque are also present in my sculpture Nostalgia is a Vice, but on a more personal level. I feel that of my work so far, this piece is the most revelatory and autobiographical. Nostalgia is a bittersweet longing for an irrecoverable thing, person or period of one’s life. Vice is a mockery of the process and a personal chastisement for indulging in the practice of nostalgia. The figure, which I cast from my own body, sits slumped uncomfortably in a rickety wooden chair. Its head is back and its eyes stare into the past. I chose to replace human eyes with those of a horse because I feel the horse is a powerful symbol of servitude. Faux golden candlesticks curl from the figure’s mouth, chest, belly and groin. They are set with red candles that, while burning, drip hot wax onto the figure. Candid photographs of a nude male figure are strewn about its feet and a photograph of the subject’s penis is held in the figure’s right hand. I am not sure if the viewer will relate to the pain that nostalgia can cause, but this work is my attempt to demonstrate the ills that I have felt from unsatisfied longing. It can be helpful for the mind to revisit powerful past scenarios, but when the revisiting becomes an obsession then is the time to realize that nostalgia has become a vice.
The avatar for the exhibition, Thou Shalt Pow, is a 3D rendering of the aforementioned impish, stick figure drawing I first drew as a child. I wanted to hearken back to my unconscious mind’s long-lived tendency to spill over the edge. This character, titled simply Pow, is in rare form. It is hanging from the proverbial rafters while holding a cocktail and defacing the gallery’s wall. I chose to compose the sculpture as a life-sized stick drawing. Unlike the other works, the armature is left bare save for a spray coat of black rubber. It grins madly at the viewer as it stops to watch reactions to its childish scrawl of the word -- and its name -- ‘pow’. Although I do not think the character originally considered the disambiguation between the onomatopoeia ‘pow’ and the acronym, P.O.W., I think confusion of the two is amusing. Perhaps Pow is a prisoner of war between my conscious and unconscious mind. At the least, she is an obvious representation of my baser desires. This work is humorous and frightening. It is a tribute to my own brand of Mr. Hyde. As such, Pow demands sensory gratification at any cost.
Thou Shalt Pow is my attempt to connect with the unconscious of my viewers. I question whether my images are my own or if they may be universal. I am asking the age-old question, “Is this normal?” and looking for comparison and elucidation in the responses of my viewers. I hope that the work may give viewers the opportunity to reflect on their own private proclivities and peccadilloes. My guess is that we are all host to strange images and our unconscious is the safest place for their indulgence. This exhibition, for good or ill, strives to pull the devils from the vault and harness them to gain insight into the mechanics of creativity.