ABSTRACT

This case study presents the results of a visual exploration of an artist who is heavy with the trauma of her grandparents. This shared ancestral trauma is also found in her siblings and her father. The artist is twenty-seven years old and has had a history of anxiety and depression. The objective of this study was to explore the dynamics in which the artist engaged in the coping experience of this trauma and the resources accessed as part of the healing process. She showed extraordinary benefits as she opened up a dialogue with past-engrained issues through the process of oil painting and charcoal drawing. Her journey began with data and research collected and analyzed from archives of her grandparents from the 1920s. The results of this study indicated that a re-telling of a historical trauma narrative can be processed through art making, and this may assist post-trauma recovery. Montina Hussey is Case Study number one of Ancestral Overlap.

Keywords: epigenetic, memory, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, trauma, art therapy

Introduction

Our experience of reality is filled with fundamental overlaps. Repressed, esoteric layers are constipated with information that denotes trauma that can puncture the present moment.  In the realms of repression lies a fabric of historical wounds and experience. Through my artwork, I have opened up a dialogue with ancestral memories and energies, addressing the long-term effects of trauma and how they affect subsequent generations. Through the alchemy of paint, I rectify cellular and metaphysical memory, by translating photographs and film stills of my grandparents from the 1920s. These paintings in acrylic and oil fluctuate equally between figuration and abstraction, blurring facts and crystalizing detail. I am interested in the prick of intensity I feel about these archives of generations past, and this has resulted in a chaotic, anxious, and cathartic release through painted forms. I hold the belief that we can call up the past and direct it into a healing experience; painting allows me to transport these energies. I think we can reach our potential of being self-actualized figures of light by facing our ancient darkness and the weight of regressed past life, in the hope of creating a clearer path for future generations.

A Brief History

I grew up in a loving and nurturing epitome. After puberty, my perfect equilibrium began to splinter. Through my teenage years I watched my anxious father struggle with a hoarding addiction, in order to cope with a void caused by his father’s early death. I remember my father telling me about his parents, how his father was an abusive alcoholic and his mother was crippled with years of depression and anxiety that soon led to treatments in electroshock therapy. He always told me I reminded him of his mom. I became a secondary character to siblings burdened with alcoholism. I felt the weight of my sister, and as a nineteen-year-old girl, I wanted to fix her.

My teenage self stiffened into adulthood, and I assumed the aftermath of my family’s suffering. Heaviness and emptiness coexisted alongside the demons of fear, depression, and anxiety. These mental ailments soon settled into oil paintings that were what psychological suffering would look like if it were purged up in an entangled form.    

My past work leads the way to my present work, as it was an investigation into psychological schools of thought. I faced the abject, the looming shadows of subjective struggles. I painted the liberating release of this repressed subject matter. There was still an itch, an uncomfortable blockage not being touched on in my work. Then I came across an old photo album, and I knew what I had to produce next.

Translating History

In the summer of 2015 I came across photographs and video archives of my father’s parents in the 1920s. As I stared into the pale imagery mauled by the decades, I experienced a pang of nostalgia for a time never experienced. Roland Barthes would say I experienced a punctum, “something shoots out like an arrow and pierces me” (Barthes 27). These historical archives invoke a corporal sensation that overflowed into the studio. The outcome became oil paintings and experimentation with projection and drawing.

I paint directly from photographs, and through the filter of painting the image is deformed. My paintings are not exact re-creations of the source material, but a distorted recalling of my impressions and emotions attached to the resource material. Throughout the process, I discovered that the material triggered deep anxiety and depression. I do not depict this ancestral world but participate in its transformation, in hopes of shifting my mental ailments into catharsis. I wanted to investigate my grandparents in the way Roland Barthes epitomizes a photograph of his mother:

I want to outline the loved face by thought to make it into the unique field of an intense observation, I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth. By doing this, I will finally reach my mother’s very being. (Barthes 99)

In this case, painting acted as a vehicle to allow me to get to know my grandparents and their essence. I began to be fuelled by the traumatic memories of them, and sewed those threads onto the canvas.

Relevant Medical or Psychological Diagnosis

My work is supported by the research findings of epigenetic memory: the idea that environmental influences and trauma can change the gene expression of DNA and then can affect the genes of your child and possibly even grandchildren (Thompson). This has been found in the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and those of First Nations heritage. I am proof of this.

My work consists of painting about the life and wounds of my grandparents. While in the studio, I was overwhelmed by sadness and paralyzing emotion that flooded through my body as I connected to my grandparents’ trauma and coupled it with the alcoholism, depression, and anxiety that has found its way into myself and my immediate family’s life. My art has always been about releasing my anxiety, and when I narrow down where this anxiety began, I look to my grandparents. I paint them in response to this study.

Our genes respond to the world, and it has lasting effects.  Along with our subjective memory, molded by the nature, nurture, and our explorations of our transient experience, there is a deeper catalyst to our suffering at work. Phobias, mental illness, instinct, and trauma can be passed down, and through painting about the rumination in pain and suffering, I invite a release and transformation.

Materials and Treatment

I gravitate towards a photo, one that calls to be resurrected as new mode of creation. Then I begin to paint it. Terry Meyers explains that, “painting is human, and an unbroken tradition that encompasses the entire known history of man” (Meyers 26). Since my source is historical, I believe using something that is so embedded in our past is a great route of exploration. I am an aggressive and energetic worker. I interact with my canvas as I let intuitive impulsivity lead the way to most of my painting decisions. I give free rein to powerful energies, and allow the alchemy of paint to take over. I love paint for the obvious signature of intense organic labour that only paint can allow. I agree with Francis Bacon’s philosophy that accidents are necessary:

What I do believe is that chance and accident are the most fertile things at any artist’s disposal at the present time. I’m trying to do some portraits now and I’m just hoping that they’ll come about by chance. I just long to capture an appearance without it being an illustrated appearance. (Fisher 32)

I render layer upon layer of paint. I start with acrylic and house paint, which allow me to brainstorm the composition and a variety of brush strokes while taking advantage of impermanent materials. These materials allow for a traumatic blueprint of how I am feeling.

The colours in the strokes are both bold and incongruous. I then use oil paint for the surface layer to breathe in the liveliness and tactility that oil paint does so well. The paint application is thick, chaotic, varied, and irrational. Some areas are rendered while others are wholly abstract. I then abrasively scrape away at the canvas.

The results are sometimes ambiguous figures with their faces collapsed and torn, and the background fights for attention with the figure. These subjects scream a vintage, nostalgic quality and answer the question, what does trauma look like?

Paint as a Metaphor

My grandparents’ experiences and biological imprint are a part of the many nexuses of layers that form the experiences of my family. I want to emphasize this idea by using numerous layers in my work. I love adding and deleting areas of paint just like tags of genetic code on a DNA strand. This work lies in the domain of memory. Memories, unclear at times, can be revisited, but each time they are altered irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left, but the last time you recalled it (Paul).

With tiny differences attaching onto each cycle, the exercise of memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away. I find this mournful and depressing, but it is this that I want to echo in my work. I want my work to demand an elegiac quality while each brush mark resembles and distorts something familiar within oneself. My technique of actively rendering an area, scraping it away and then adding it again can be seen as a metaphor to the workings of memory. Since my source material is grainy and stripped of colour, I must invent my colour schemes, similar to how we impose imaginary facts to memories.

Other Cases

Throughout history, there seems to be an interrelationship between suffering and creativity. In Dr. Ghadirian’s book, Creativity in Suffering, he brings up the example of Van Gogh, who also seemed haunted by ancestral trauma:

Van Gogh may have used his artistic talent and creativity as a therapy to transform his suffering into something positive and productive, as he was undoubtedly able to express the forces of nature in colours to enhance emotions and feelings. For example, one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, “Starry Night”, was produced during his stay in Saint-Remy asylum when he was between psychotic episodes. It reflects a feeling of peaceful reconciliation between ancestral forces (turbulent mind) and the laws and cycles of nature. (Ghadirian 81)

Present in my studio exists a chaotic display of small sized oil paintings of my grandparents, an explosion of introversion into the public, a visual representation of historical trauma. Other contemporary artists create in the rhythm of this context.

Growing up in post-Holocaust Europe, artist Christian Boltanski uses autobiographical archives of photographs of his childhood. He speaks about the human condition within the collective memory of history (Nairne 142). Another contemporary artist, Adrian Ghenie, informs the collective unconscious, which refers to the submerged mind and memories of the human collective (Nairne 136). His compositions consist of collective histories and his own personal memories.

My contemporaries and I have immersed ourselves in the constructive process of reimagining the past.

Results

Through this practice, I have witnessed untapped emotional energy that was waiting to be uncovered. I surrendered to the gravity of my ancestors’ trauma, hoping to pull out this repressed suffering and transform it through the healing domain of painting. I was able to connect to my grandparents, and in doing this, I actually befriended their trauma. My work has never emphasized the final product, but rather the emotional wrestling undertook while getting to know past histories. “Suffering is a process, and so is creativity. A process implies a journey; it is not so much about reaching a destination as about what is involved in getting there” (Ghadirian 144). My studio practice unraveled me, it made me face my ancestral memory, and now I have reached catharsis.

WORK CITED

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.

Fischer, Peter. Warhol, Polke, Richter: In the Power of Painting 1 : A Selection from the Daros Collection = Eine Auswahl Aus Der Daros Collection. Zürich: Daros in Collaboration with Scalo, 2001. Print.

Ghadirian, A-M. Creative Dimensions of Suffering. Wilmette, IL: Baha’i Pub., 2009. Print.

Myers, Terry R. Painting. London: Whitechapel Gallery ;, 2011. Print.

Nairne, Sandy, Sarah Howgate, Andrew Graham-Dixon, and Jo Fredell. Higgins. 21st Century Portraits. Print.

Paul, Marla. “News.” Your Memory Is like the Telephone Game: Northwestern University. 19 Sept. 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.

Thompson, Helen. “Study of Holocaust Survivors Finds Trauma Passed on to Children’s Genes.” The Guardian. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.