Art as Therapy

Rachel Bailey is an artist I’ve got to know through the artist peer mentoring group over the course of the past 2 years (she was one of our original members). As artists, we have shared a common preoccupation with themes of identity and draw upon the theoretical influences of our respective trainings as Art Therapists. Rachel has been supportive of my practice and continues to signpost me towards artists, texts and exhibitions that she feels might be relevant to my work. Recently she has drawn my attention to an interesting article about the Claude Cahun/Gillian Wearing exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – Behind the Mask, Another Mask. I have since seen this exhibition and hope to write about it through the blog.

As a means of repaying the favor, I was keen to promote Rachel’s upcoming exhibition – The Transgression of Dolls (Exploring myth, fiction and its relation to self and identity – through material objects) at Waterstones on Gower Street in London. The following blog entry is an interview I conducted with Rachel on Friday 31st March where she outlines her current art practice and the rationale for the exhibition. Please be sure to check it out!

 

Can you say a little bit about your training/ art practice?

Well my MA was at the Ruskin which is Oxford. It was quite hard as we were mostly left to our own devices so it was kind of sink or swim. I spent the first two years floundering but by the third year I had found my feet and did well and enjoyed it. I was making sculptural objects mostly out of paper, scrunched up and gathered paper (paper made into textiles).

I then went to the Slade where I applied and got into the painting department, which may have been an error because I was never a painter. I don’t know why they accepted me, but they did. I could never make the things that were inside my head because I didn’t have the technical support. It was quite compartmentalized. I always seem to be a bit of an outsider, maybe that’s what I choose for myself.

After the Slade I won a really big prize – The Vordemberge-Gildewart Art Prize. He was a Swiss Constructivist Artist. It’s given annually in a different European country and I was nominated. I didn’t know what it was, I remember I had to take my work to the Annely Juda Gallery, but they wouldn’t tell me what the prize was so I just left my stuff there. I ended up winning it and received £18,000 which just came out of the blue. It was a really good thing, but I didn’t know how to become an Artist off the back of it. Maybe I was already too isolated; maybe I wasn’t speaking with my own voice.

You also previously trained as an Art Therapist at Goldsmiths. Can you say how this has informed your art practice?

I think my art education set up a lot of mental prohibitions; all the things it shouldn’t be. So, it shouldn’t be craft, it shouldn’t be narrative, it shouldn’t illustrative and I added a few more like it shouldn’t be detailed or decorative…. And I think by the time I got to thirty I reached a dead end, I couldn’t do anything. I remember my partner at the time saying that my work was so quiet it was virtually silent. Anyway we split up and in the emotional trauma that followed I reevaluated many things, including my art making self.

I did an Art Therapy foundation course at City University. It was very directive and I think the first or second session we had to make a mask to represent ourselves. Goldsmiths was so anti that, you’d never do anything like that there. But it was amazing. I remember going up and getting sugar paper, a feather, glitter and the pipe cleaners. I felt exciting and creative. I think I was quite surprised by what I did. It so expresses something about me, and nobody else could see how deeply it really resonated. I seemed to be able to get myself back into my work again after that but in a different way.

It sounds as though your art education narrowed your field of vision. And then, something about studying to become an Art Therapist kind of broadened it out a bit so you were less blinkered.

Yeah, nicely put.

Your exhibition is called The Transgression of Dolls (Exploring myth, fiction and its relation to self and identity – through material objects). Where did this title come from?

Well, I had a life coaching session (about the exhibition) with a new friend of mine who I met through the open studios. It was helpful to have someone I didn’t know ask me what I wanted to get out of it. She suggested that it would good to include some sort of provocative statement and ‘transgression’ does kind of hint at something a bit dark and potentially sexually alluring. I quite like that dirty world aspect of it. But it does have a link to play and play as transgression: an activity that, as an adult, it’s hard to find the time to do and it just feels a bit naughty. So, transgression has a link to play and getting a creative energy from not doing something that you think you should (being a trickster to yourself).

The subtitle is a bit labored. I’ve been working in solitude for such a long time, just allowing myself to do what I want to do. It’s very hard now to stand back and say, “this is what it is.”

A thread which seems to run through your work concerns the juxtaposition between concealment and exposure. Similarly, within your blog, you speculate on which side of yourself will be ‘seen’ at this exhibition. I wondered how it felt to show these works publicly for the first time.

I seem to be oscillating between a dogged, “I’m just going to do it” and sheer demented terror, but that’s under control. I think my friends and colleagues will be interested and that’s fine.

What relevance, if any, is there to showing your work at Waterstones?

I worked at Waterstones myself for a very long time so I have a history with the company. I like the idea of doing it there because when I started writing my blog I didn’t realize that my inspiration comes so much about what I’ve been reading. I discovered that books seem to inform me more than the things I look at. It was interesting going through that Tate Etc. article you sent me [Are We All Anxious Now? By Jill Bennett] as she talks about how reading is between yourself and the book whereas as soon as you show and make work it’s immediately more sociable. Much more is revealed. So I feel quite good about the exhibition being in Waterstones. I had intended to have a little display of books and also a copy of The Doll Dossier which is featured on my website. This is a collection of images and quotations that I have gathered about dolls, puppets, transitional objects etc.

One’s association of dolls is that they are to be touched, held or handled in some way. Do you have any expectation as to how people should interact with your dolls given their materiality as objects?

Well because the space is not completely invigilated, I’ve made boxes for them. I’ve got a couple that I’ll bring out on the days when I’m there, but mostly they’re not going to be handled. They’ll either be in little boxes or there will be photographs of them. The thing that has really remained with me is this quote from the French feminist-thinker, Luce Irigaray who talks about using dolls as a handmade object between mothers and daughters to communicate what they can’t say (to take up a special relationship). I don’t think I really understand it, but for some reason it’s kind of stuck with me. There’s definitely something about the exchange and I really liked passing my doll around at the [peer mentoring group] meeting. They were envisaged to be passed around, but they’re not. They don’t fulfill their destiny in some way.

In my blog, I’ve been looking at a Brazilian Artist called Lygia Clark as she did happenings with objects which are passed around. People interact with them. Although, my dolls take a long time to make and if they are handed around they’ll be spoilt and dirtied. I don’t know how to get around that. Lygia Clark’s objects are things like rubber bands, balls, inflated plastic bags – quickly replaceable or mass produced things; not loaded with crafting hours like mine.

There’s also something quite erotic about other people handling something you’ve made. Maybe it’s an extension of yourself? There’s one doll that I showed at an open studio event, it’s the doll that’s disappearing into a horn shape. A woman visitor to the studio just pulled the doll out and I could feel it in my body, it was electric. It was as though she had touched me.

What would you like people to take away from this exhibition?

I’ve mostly invited people that I know, like people that I’ve lost touch with from Goldsmiths and from the Ruskin. I’m also hoping that I’ll have some nice conversations with people who just pop in. I sent an invite to UCL’s department of Psychoanalysis because that’s been a big thing that’s informed the work. I don’t know if anyone will come.

Because I haven’t really shown before, it’s like a big experiment. I’m thinking of it like a big laboratory of things I think are quite good and things that are maybe less good, but I’m still glad I made them. I don’t know how to articulate what I want someone else to get from it. I hope I will find out!

Will there be an opportunity for you to gain feedback?

Because I’m planning on being there for the tail end of the week I thought I might take some work, or sewing, and think about it almost like an open studio because those conversations are really nice. I would’ve liked to have had some workshops, but I can’t get my head around it at this point. Being there and seeing how people respond means that hopefully they’ll be an invitation to share (instead of it just all being about me).

 

The Transgression of Dolls…. will be showing from April 19th – 20th May 2017 at The Gallery, Waterstone’s, 82 Gower Street, WC1E 6EQ.

For more information about Rachel’s art practice (and her blog), please go to: www.quietmedusa.com

 

Last time, I mentioned the importance of having the blog to share ideas and to strike up dialogues with other artists about things I’m working on. However, I must also highlight how helpful it has been to receive peer mentorship through regular meetings with other like-minded artists/ Art Therapists.

The artist peer mentoring group that I set up two years ago (loosely named Art + Me) was devised as a means of primarily identifying other Art Therapists, both trainees and fully-qualified professionals who would also call themselves active artists. The initial callout drew artists of various disciplines who share this dual role, although over the years we have relaxed our criteria to also artists who have an interest in Art Therapy or are training in other therapeutic disciplines.

Last month we had our 11th meeting together and the growing number of members means that we’re now looking to meet once a month. We’re also discussing options for a group exhibition together this year. The meeting was also an opportunity to give selected artists a space to talk about their work and to receive feedback from the rest of the group. On this occasion, I had an opportunity to share my work, a prospect that filled me with a certain degree of panic.

As mentioned previously within my blog, I have really struggled to stay motivated as an artist. Prior to the peer group meeting, I felt as though I had lots of ideas or things that I had started on, but very little to show since our last meeting together. As a result, I decided to present the group with an appraisal of my artworks-in-progress to date so that I could disseminate my energies in the upcoming months. As an artist, it can often be difficult to give a concise summary of what it is you do, or your overriding themes, but talking about my practice within the group always feels safe and encouraging. I enjoy the discipline of retelling people what my work is about.

Since 2015, my practice has been split between multiple works that explore my own identity, primarily through self-portraiture. These works encompass a range of media including video, drawing and assemblage. Although, they are all derived from the same source material – a vast compendium of photographs I’ve been taking of myself over the past two years. I now have an archive of nearly 900 images and I’m still going!

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One work that I decide to show was my ‘post-it portrait’ – a large scale wall drawing of myself in pencil, made up of hundreds of post-it notes. However, the enormity of the task has left me feeling demotivated. I recently calculated that the final image will be made up of 609 post-its. Thus far, I have only completed about 180, less than a third. One suggestion from the group was whether the artwork could be developed as a collaborative exercise undertaken by close friends and family in which each person is sent a square to complete independently and sent back. I really liked the idea that the artwork’s construction might become some sort of participatory event. Making an artwork in this way would mean that I would have even less autonomy over what the final image might look like.

I also showed another artwork I’d been working on, a composite image which alludes to the constraints of traditional self-portraiture to capture one’s identity, in any kind of fixed way, due to the way our appearances change with time.

The work started out as an experiment, overlaying multiple self-images which were blown up to A3-size photocopies. Each of the images were then cut into thin strips (3mm wide) using a metal ruler and scalpel and then layered on top of one another. The resulting artwork initially looks like streamers, or a beaded curtain, as one group member described it. However, on closer inspection you start to discern the basic outline of face. I also discovered that when I held the artwork in front of a mirror, and shook it gently, the image would shimmer slightly. It was as if I’d seen my reflection in a pool of water, an allusion to the myth of Narcissus.

I quite liked that the image moved or could be animated in some way, and presenting this work to the group was useful in terms of thinking about how it could be developed and exhibited.

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As it was, feedback from group members was mixed. For instance, some identified that they liked the size of the work whereas others felt it should be much bigger. One suggestion was to recreate the image on a much larger scale whereby viewers could pass through the artwork. This idea really captured my imagination and shares similarities with another artwork – Threshold, that I made 9 years ago whilst at Wimbledon College of Art. That artwork was inspired by themes of ritualism and the connections held between physical action and transcendence. It took the form a large curtain, hung from the ceiling, that individuals were invited to pass through. The idea was based on Biblical descriptions of the Holy of Holies – the inner sanctuary within the Tabernacle where God is said to have dwelt. The Holy of Holies was set apart by a veil, and no one could enter except the High Priest, and even he could only enter once a year. These descriptions also provoke comparisons with the Black Lodge – the extradimensional space featured in the television series Twin Peaks, perhaps another unconscious influence at the time.

It is interesting that this veil/curtain motif has arisen within my practice again, although this time in relation to themes of identity. Drawing on the feedback of the group, I liked the idea that the work could be interactive and people could pass through or ‘go behind the veil’ to discover something else about me that might otherwise be hidden. What this might be, I’m still unsure. I feel that the next stage will be to think about how the art work might be developed as some type of installation or environment that others can interact with. Within the peer mentoring group, there was a discussion about whether my self-image needs to be an integral part of the curtain or veil or, alternatively, could it be a projected image. In terms of next steps, it might be worth making some form of small model or prototype to help me make sense of what this might look like.