The distraction of full-time education is wearing off and my youngest child has turned 7. I find myself with more space and time to reconsider my experience of life and to make some decisions about how I want to move forwards careerwise. The last 14 years have been outwardly intensive – giving birth to and raising three boys; moving house several times from Hamburg to London to Wales; moving my mother house twice in Cyprus; sitting Bar exams; and undertaking an art degree; etc.
But what about inwardly?
When I was a single woman in my early twenties I had a lot of spare time. I lived alone, away from family and school friends, and was responsible only to myself outside of work hours. Becoming a mother for the first time turned that world inside out and upside down, leaving little energy or time to take care of what was going on inside my heart and mind. But it apparently didn’t matter because the duties of everyday life eventually felt like the meaning of life. Inner life got buried and forgotten.
With my new found space and time, however, I’m loath to get pulled back into that place where outer life completely takes over and connection to the deeper meaning is lost. And at the same time, I would never want to return to the loneliness that marked my early twenties.
Because I strongly desire to go out and find my place in the world as an artist, I feel the need for actively cultivating inner life. I want to achieve inner space so that I don’t feel quite so exposed to and chopped up by a world that feels driven by materialistic dreams that leave no room to contemplate spiritual reality. A world where I wish to feel whole despite everything that works against such a human need.
Where does my painting practice fit in with this mission to reach into the spirit while having my feet planted firmly on earth?
At the moment I’m working on different ways of kickstarting a process, developing techniques and palettes that feel in tune with where I’m at. At the same time as developing the conceptual basis for the work, I’m working towards producing sellable objects.
One of the main objectives with these is to remain open. By this I mean that I want to prevent recognisable objects but I also want to prevent overly solidified forms of any sort. This way of painting runs parallel to cultivating inner space within which I can achieve some sense of freedom.
I’m an emerging artist and I recently stated on my New Blood Art profile that my work is inspired by the spirit of surrealism (as well as the lives and work of the abstract expressionists). This is the closest I’ve come so far to openly connecting myself with established western art movements, and it’s not something I feel entirely comfortable doing. I find with labelling comes the danger of over-conceptualising so that the living reality of the person or thing labelled becomes lost to us. However, I think it’s useful to use art terms and other concepts because it provides a starting point for conscious investigation into our lives.
André Breton published the first Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris in 1924. Its point was to introduce a new movement, which Breton stated was a way of life rather than a tendency to make a particular style of art. A ‘way of life’ is born out of the way a person processes the world through their individual understanding. A ‘way of life’ represents and is established through all the decisions made by a person leading up to the most current version of themselves. Surrealism intended, therefore, to challenge the ways a person made decisions that substantially affected their lives.
In the first manifesto, Breton talks about the importance of imagination. He does more than hint at the danger of an over-reliance on reason when he talks about the ‘reduction of the imagination to a state of slavery.’ This is one of the elements of surrealism that I feel connected to, especially where my work has moved from figuration towards abstraction and distorted observations, for example in the following drawings in progress:
But of course, it’s not all about the work itself, it’s about life! I seek in my own life to undo learned assumptions and biases and to find a renewed understanding of how this world functions. My work represents ways of processing that dare to engage the power of imagination.
