Writings

 

 

Full Circle

 

The ground shifts, perceptions change and reality distorts!

 

Traditionally, I have used the body as metaphor, while using a meditative process during the act of painting. I am interested in the interaction between my personal journey and that of others. This current body of work is largely autobiographical developed through perception, objects and memory.

‘it is in voicing the memories to another that changes their meaning, their significance, and their impact, on both the listener and the narrator… reforming our sense of self as we come repeatedly under the influence not only of our own pasts as we understood them by others but by the pasts of others.’[1]

 

Follow Me Out 

 

I chose the disciplines of painting and drawing with the intention of documenting an active engagement with my bouts of acute depression. For me depression brings apathy, lethargy and pain, and I have sought, through scrupulous self observation, to understand whether the meditative but often energizing processes of painting and drawing could make me happy, could help me transcend these disabling states of mind.

Many artists whose work portrays pathos and other emotions usually do so by using expressionistic techniques’, but I still want and need to paint paintings and or draw beautifully crafted artefacts, I think this is the paradox and ambiguous nature of my work.

This body of work is a quite a departure from my previous work, where I exclusively made paintings of myself. I have found a greater freedom in using the female nude as an armature for the colours and compositions of my states of mind as I go down and as I come up.

 “Melancholy is not just a category of subjective experience, but also a cultural trope that involves the disjunction and the interrelation between the self and world, between the contingent and the transcendent.”

I thought this quote by Lewis Carroll from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass describes the feeling of depression well.

 

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. 

The rabbit hole went straight on like a tunnel in some way, and then suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, but she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.  First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything… Lewis Carroll

The diptych Dichotomy (thought versus action) is the crux of this exhibition; it is the heaven and the hell of depression.

 

 

Meanwhile…

 

The gulf existing between the body-for-self and the body-for-others seems impassable” Simone de Beauvoir

Where in the world of stereotypes does Deborah Trusson fit? am I trying to break out of or fit into the mold of  perceived normality.

My intention is to challenge the viewer or the viewer’s perceptions of beauty and body image. I tend to use confrontational opposites – strength/vulnerability, intimacy/alienation, validation/annulment, and empowerment/disenfranchisement.

Considering the binary system of stereotypes, I also seem to provoke ambivalence, and conflicting attitudes. I am trying to co-exist, to claim my space in society… Despite whatever understanding or misunderstanding my work may provoke, I offer myself, for myself……

“To live in fear of one’s body and one’s life is not to live at all.” Naomi Wolfe