Dearest Reader,
Let me tell you about these amorphous forms.
When I was a girl I had a bully, the kind of bully that ensnares you as her ‘Best Friend’ only to inflict hurtful games and shameful rules upon you. I didn’t fight back during the day and at night I was haunted by a recurring dream, one where a single strand of hair would be pursued, and finally consumed, by a large ball of clay. Thus in my sleep inanimate matter came to life, playing back to me with brutal force the things that I couldn’t admit to experiencing, those things that Freud identified as children’s principle morbid anxieties: silence, darkness and solitude.
Later I read, and was similarly disturbed by, Ted Hughes’ ‘How the Whale Became’; I found the ‘whale’ in the story as uncanny and unsettling as the clay ball of my nightmare. The creature begins as an inert, voiceless, ‘black shiny bean’ in God’s garden, but grows rapidly into an enormous, protesting mass, helplessly crushing everything around him and reflecting the world in his tight, shiny skin. The whale begs to be left where he is but is eventually rolled into the sea, where he remains forever, repeatedly growing and shrinking in the vast ocean.
The forms I paint now, limbless and silent, thrill and sadden and terrify me as much as Hughes’ whale and my ball of clay did, and in addition to the formal concerns of painting: where and how to position these forms, which colours to use, what kind of landscape to place them in? I also employ certain animistic considerations throughout the process of composition: How are these objects behaving? What do they feel?
Whatever the affect they are always either anchored or drifting and a kind of nursing or disabling will take place.
Fond regards,
AC
Let me tell you about these amorphous forms.
When I was a girl I had a bully, the kind of bully that ensnares you as her ‘Best Friend’ only to inflict hurtful games and shameful rules upon you. I didn’t fight back during the day and at night I was haunted by a recurring dream, one where a single strand of hair would be pursued, and finally consumed, by a large ball of clay. Thus in my sleep inanimate matter came to life, playing back to me with brutal force the things that I couldn’t admit to experiencing, those things that Freud identified as children’s principle morbid anxieties: silence, darkness and solitude.
Later I read, and was similarly disturbed by, Ted Hughes’ ‘How the Whale Became’; I found the ‘whale’ in the story as uncanny and unsettling as the clay ball of my nightmare. The creature begins as an inert, voiceless, ‘black shiny bean’ in God’s garden, but grows rapidly into an enormous, protesting mass, helplessly crushing everything around him and reflecting the world in his tight, shiny skin. The whale begs to be left where he is but is eventually rolled into the sea, where he remains forever, repeatedly growing and shrinking in the vast ocean.
The forms I paint now, limbless and silent, thrill and sadden and terrify me as much as Hughes’ whale and my ball of clay did, and in addition to the formal concerns of painting: where and how to position these forms, which colours to use, what kind of landscape to place them in? I also employ certain animistic considerations throughout the process of composition: How are these objects behaving? What do they feel?
Whatever the affect they are always either anchored or drifting and a kind of nursing or disabling will take place.
Fond regards,
AC