Artist's research and influences
I strongly identify with the thematic concerns of French-American sculptor Louise Joséphine Bourgeois. Bourgeois transformed her childhood experiences of trauma into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects to symbolise psychological pain. Focusing on the fusion of past and present in her work, she perceived art as a therapeutic or cathartic process that allows for the working out of private anxieties or emotions. For Bourgeois, “the function of memory is not only to recall, reconstitute or reconcile the past but also to construct and represent the present” (Gibbons 2007:16).
Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst who gained an international reputation as an original interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work. Lacan states “that art isn’t only private fantasy, it also belongs to the public arena of history and culture” (D'Alleva 2012:98). Through my art, I gain a platform for making my private pain public and linking my personal experience to the broader realm of history and culture.
Lacan writes in depth about the relationship between the experience of lack, on the one hand, and the way lack pulls us into the domain of the symbolic, on the other. Language for Lacan is about loss and absence: you only require words when the object you want is gone. He theorised that if all our needs were met, we would not learn to communicate (Hook 2007:67). My need for filling the void of my loss channels my work into the symbolic, while identification with the loss of my father makes me continually seek to re-find what I have lost, through verbal as well as visual language.
