27/10/19
Having had my tutorial with Jo last week I’ve had time to reflect on what we discussed and unpick my thoughts a bit more. Jo has helped me see what has been hampering my productivity, my lack of commitment to what I want to create, which comes from a lack of confidence in “exposing” myself creatively.
On the one hand I tell Jo I want to create art that is emotive and touch on those deep dark emotions that I felt when I went to Kiasma and saw the music/video performance The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson.Then, on the other, I show her Sarah Balls photoetchings, which as Jo said, aren’t the same thing at all! These are quiet images, drawn in detail and all about the gaze of the individual.
It’s this inconsistency that bothers me, I feel it has been hampering my development as an artist for years. I’m very good at telling myself my skill set is the wrong skill set and discard too lightly what I am good at.
These are complicated unconscious motivations and limiters. What I do know is that The Visitors has stayed with me because it has such a strong emotional impact on me. It was spellbinding, it made me want to cry and smile at the same time. I couldn’t say what about, just the music, the way we could walk around and interact in the environment was astonishing to my soul. That’s the type of art I’m meant to be making.
I spoke to my mum about it, that I need to dig deeper and understand where my portraits are coming from, why why why the face. That experience in Kiasma is key and relates two other emotional experiences I had over that week. One was a small baby crying inconsolably on the flight home from Finland, it was heartbreaking. The other was the joyous laughter of a slightly older baby on the train to Camberwell. Their mum was bouncing a ball and it was making this baby laugh so much I thought they were on the edge of tears.
I’ve realised through my conversation with my mum that these experiences created extreme feelings of pleasure and of pain. They’re exquisite emotions. I cannot have one without the other and I’ve spent many years suppressing the darker feelings I had as a teenager and young adult, which has lead me to also suppress the opposite feelings. Leaving me in a personal and creative vacuum, where I have dumbed down much of what motivates me to be creative and made me unsure of my footing. There can be no pleasure without pain. They’re dualities and I have to embrace both to achieve what I want in my art. No light without dark, if I’m scared of my darkness and avoid it I cannot achieve anything near sublime feelings I felt in Kiasma.
I am no expert on depression, I’ve avoiding acknowledging it for years and have managed it for those years too, but on a personal level I need to embrace, not fear, these experiences and let my art be charged by them.
It’s the pleasure/pain, light/dark dualities that will inform my practice. This impossible duality of life, this is what I see when I look into a mirror and draw a self-portrait and it can be almost unbearable. This is what I felt in Kiasma and THIS is why I paint portraits and why illustration was never going to be enough for me.
THIS is how I use the idea of the abject, push the boundaries of a portrait.
Marigold Plunkett 