I was interviewed a few weeks ago by Philipa and John from Creative Elements magazine, and the new edition will go live in the next few days. I will post the link as soon as I have it. The drafts look good though, I’m really pleased!
I recently had an afternoon off, and visited the new Tate St. Ives photography show with Penny Florence. I loved the very tiny works made whilst out on walks, and also, especially, the Claude Cahun works, which have prompted me to look again at feminism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism. Laura Gascoigne wrote about my work within that context, and it’s taken me a while to see the sense of her contextualising. I loved Cahun’s photographs because of the way she placed the female form – her own body – within the photograph, and her relationship with natural forms and her own body parts: She plays with her form in a poetic and mildly disconcerting way. How the seaweed, the wavy strands, surround her pubic area providing a sea-ish skirt, a hairy growing of fronds. Or her crown growing skywards, egg-suggesting, bald.
The ice-egg held up to the sky by tiny hands, looking like those of children, and I made drawings from these, and twins appeared, joined at the navel. I love it when an image readily suggests, grows happily, eagerly, into new forms.
I’ve had Bracha Ettinger’s book The Matrixial Borderspace for some time, and it appears to me, that whichever page I open it at offers me a pertinent insight for the work I happen to be making.
Here are some passages from the book I find particularly useful in helping me to understand what I am doing with my work, and also, how/why viewers of my work can respond the way they do:
Metramorphosis is a co-naissance – knowledge of being-born-together – which is not cognitive and does not enter direct representation. We can nevertheless reflect on it, taking into account the errors introduced by Symbolic language. We can also grasp it in painting, if the painting accedes to the appearance of the memory of oblivion, to the blind memory of I and non-I lodging in me without my self-control. Metramorphic relation is neither Oedipal nor even pre-Oedopal. It is a non-phallic erotic co=response-ability: a Eurydician tuning of the erotic aerials of the psyche, always in dangerous proximity to Thanatos. (p.144).
In the passage from the phallic gaze to the matrixial gaze, we leave the zone of desire for an object, caused by a missing object. We move away from the question of phantasy, into a sphere where desire is for borderlinking and the “object of desire” is not an absence or lack but a process of disappearance whose basis is a traumatic encounter….
Matrixial awareness channels the subject’s desire, mixed with fascination and horror, towards beauty and pain, the trauma of others. My awareness cannot master you through the traces in my psyche, and there is no joining without separation, nor separating without joining. the desire to join-in difference and differentiate-in-co-emerging with the Other does not promise peace and harmony, because joining is first of all a joining with-in the other’s trauma that echoes back to my archaic traumas:joining the other matrixially is always joining the m/Other and rising mental fragmentation and vulnerability. A matrixial gaze gives rise to it’s own desire, which can generate dangerous encounters, because here desire is not separated from fascination, and the Other is not cut off from its jouissance.. (p.147).
Yesterday whilst working on a new, dense, shadowy work a dog appeared from the deep, a mountain dog, a dog who finds those whoa re lost, who also nurses; a breast was growing from her neck, white and running with milk which she calmly observed, but which I could not make sense of. I washed over it. I will return to it, maybe re-instate the breast? Milk from throat is suggested. Milk with speech. Milk-coated words, white words, words which are wet and which feed.