"His rooms are inner landscapes, incongruous yet skilfully constructed, illogical as dreams and pure like gems. It is as if the silver gelatin process turned the artist's practice into a branch of geology that delves into his psyche like a mine, searching for meaning by taking core samples of its successive layers, sediments and fossils. Reaching into the twilight of consciousness where memories amass and dreams are born - the murky place that lies at the centre of the earth, of life, of the human being."
Taken from the introduction of Roger Ballan's Asylum of the Birds, written by Didi Bozzine
Wow - that sentence is just too exciting for me... I love everything about it and I now feel compelled to write down what I have been thinking about all day.
This morning as I was packing away a huge pile of clothes that had been waiting in the laundry basket for days - I'm sure I only just did this chore but it is never ending - it occurred to me that the work I have been doing, in particular the work from Assignments 2 & 3, is heading in a definite direction which may (or may not) culminate in Assignment 5. I certainly felt that some, if not all, of Assignment 3's images were unformed, or unfinished. Nevertheless they are a development from images in A2 and related somehow to much of the work I am looking at and thinking about. For me that work of mine is an expression of experience that is difficult to be concise about although I wrote in A2:
"These images are an expression of where I have been and acceptance of where I am now. I hope there is keening, death, love, sex, innocence, isolation and aging in them. There should also be fear of the unknown but an acceptance of that fear, excitement, celebration and play. For me these are the words that describe life so far and in particular pertain to events of the last two, possibly three years."
I also thought this morning of all the work of other photographers that I have been looking at over the last few months and very definitely the work I'm focusing on lately - many of which are trying to express something from our unconscious worlds.
One of the most important books I read last year, and I read a lot then, was Jung - A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Stevens which I have no doubt mentioned here before, if not several times. (I should probably try to find the equivalent of a long introduction but Steven's book was excellent and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to know about Jung and his ideas - have I said that before? I can be quite repetitive when there is something I feel strongly about.)
When I read that book I was absolutely taken with it and with Jung, who despite being a cheating bastard (sorry - it's just too hard not to spit like a viper when I say that), wrote about life in way that made a great deal of sense to me. We must take our inner worlds seriously, they are key to understanding who we are, growing and living a full life. The spiritual or non-material, illogical and inexplicable world is as valuable and important as its opposite. We must listen to our fantasies - and it we don't our dreams will make us. And if not those, then mental illness will instead. Our psyche will make us hear.
I had been intrigued by archetypes ever since learning about them when I was doing my A'levels, now over two decades ago. And so learning about them in more detail was fascinating.
The idea of a 'shadow', of anima and animus, of life having steps which we needed to take in order to reach the next phase, rites of passage and individuation all made so much sense to me. I was also extremely interested in his value of fantasy, of fairy-tales and stories, and was encouraged by what I read to write a bizarre and peculiar fantasy of my own that expressed something of what I'd experienced. Exploring what I was going through by writing my strange gown-up fairy tale was incredibly cathartic and even if nothing else comes of reading that book, I will always be grateful for that story which I would not have written had I not downloaded Jung - A Very Short Introduction.
I do, however, think there is more to come out it, along with many of the other books and artists I've been looking at. The work I am most interested in at the moment is very much about our inner worlds, about how that can be expressed.
There is also something in Jung's work - and I think this is part of the synchronicity story - about how we recreate our inner worlds in our material world. So, I noticed at one point in my life that everyone in my family lived in homes that had incredibly precarious stairs or balconies or both, which seemed an accurate reflection of something very particular to our family. The thing is we don't notice these things that we live with, even though they tell us a story about what's happening beneath the surface. Well, 'beneath the surface' is probably the wrong expression and for now I am not sure what the right words are. But art, stories, and songs manage to find a way to illuminate those stories. There are so many artists from every sphere looking at this and I think I have just begun to understand that this is what a lot of art is doing - even when it's not entirely obvious. So some art is more obviously an expression of our inner worlds but I'm not sure the less obvious, less surreal, stuff isn't also an expression of something spiritual and 'other -worldliness'. Not sure I'm making much sense now. Not sure how any of this rather meandering post fits into things, and I think I am missing bits in my mind but...
Anyway, I think the work going forward has to be a development from what I have done so far. I'm not sure at the moment how to approach A4 or ensure I move forward but I hope it will come to me - and obviously the images will in part be dictated by assignment parameters. I also hope I will be brave enough to do what ever it is - by that I mean create a set if that's what I'm after or find the right location or go to it. It may be that those things aren't what ever being brave means but I have this sense in me that says - how do people allow themselves to do that? to create that? to give themselves permission?
Didi Bozzine's sentence above - is, it goes without saying, beautifully written - but it also about as wonderful a sentence as I could possibly find. Geology and consciousness, dreams and being human - it's so much of what I love and am interested in. I really hope I can continue to get closer to expressing something of that from within me in my next assignments.
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