Montina Hussey

Liberating the Repressed

When the sperm penetrates the egg, a big bang takes place creating a form that is love and spirit, a feminine energy – a baby. She travels through the birth canal and enters the world in a so called “zero state” – a perfect equilibrium of desire and satisfaction (Kristeva 7).  Her innocence has yet to splinter into a more dark complexity. Soon, her environment will shape her consciousness into a nexus of desires and drives. These alien barriers did not exist in her first breaths. She is beginning to lose herself. She develops an oral fixation to her mother’s body, and has conflicting feelings of unconditional love, attachment, lust, and jealousy. She is a living Freudian theory. This, and many other infantile moments catapult her into a complex life held together by repression.

            She stiffens into adulthood, and knotted lumps of psychological suffering constipate her. Heaviness and emptiness coexist. One day, an outside trigger shoots at the wall of her psyche and the knotted forms are set loose, but in a way that is demonic and overpowering. Their names are fear, depression, and anxiety.  She is an artist now, expressing this psychological language as oil painted entangled forms. I began to aggressively hatch together irrational colours mixed with the tints of flesh. With paint, brush, finger, and palette knife, I subjectively expressed what collective psychological suffering would look like if it were physically puked up and knotted together in one singular form. My intent is to rip open the placenta of ordinary consciousness and liberate the repressed. If one shifts the unconscious to awareness, it can be thoroughly expressed as art making. This can lead to healing and transfiguration. This aim has been influenced by various psychoanalytical and artistic schools of thought, which will be expanded upon in this paper.  

            The revelation of psychoanalysis was the spark that ignited the flame that is my body of work. According to Carl Jung, psychoanalysis means to “submit oneself to the facing of the naked soul, and to the pain, and the suffering which this often entails – here in no relation to life, an absolute truth and an absolute honesty” (Jung 95). I used the medium of clay to massage Jung’s concept. My unconscious took form as grisly organic shapes, similar to the distorted and ugly figures created by art therapy patients, which stand for how they perceive themselves as whole persons (Sholt 67). The therapeutic process I put myself through and the final result might be seen as analogous to the monstrous bodies found in Contemporary art. For example, artist Berlinde De Bruyckere sculpts unnaturally distorted and fragmented bodies to communicate suffering and vulnerability (O’Reilly 176).  Her art, as with mine, alludes to past cruelty that troubles our consciousness.  

            My decision to draw on photographs of infants, either just born or in the womb, as source material might be contextualized in relation to the therapeutic approaches of Freud and Jung. I am drawn to this research because it investigates our first repressed memories of childhood. My most recent works show entangled infant forms clutched to their mothers’ breasts and the first acts of oral fixation.  These images refer back to Freud’s theory, as expanded upon by Jung, of polymorphous perverse sexuality: As the ego develops, the child experiences instincts of love, jealousy, curiosity, lust, and an incest wish towards the mother and this desire is quickly arrested by repression (Jung 262). After self-examination, and the digestion of my source material, I can now paint and release these concepts onto a canvas.

            Walking into my studio, you will witness fleshy hues, vibrant colours, and various brushstrokes ejaculated onto the canvas, creating entangled bodies that are not fully rendered and anatomically incorrect. This motif is meant to mirror the way a traumatic memory repeatedly resurfaces as a result of being repressed. Like my work, German Expressionism aimed to express raw truth with emotional and psychological intensity. It was an uprising of the spirit against reality (Elger 3).  Ernst Kirshner, a driving force in German Expressionism, spoke of anxieties, fears, and lost repressed feelings of the time of the First World War. His paintings flamboyantly showed pure unaltered colours, conspicuous brushstrokes, and unmolded areas surrounded by contours (Elger 32). As with the work of Kirshner, my mode of painting acts in rational and irrational ways. It is abstract, visceral, and beautiful with grotesque undertones. How Kirshner painted a century ago and how I present my work is an authentic way to release such unfathomable emotions.  We paint about what is hard to talk about, what we fear most.  In Self Portrait as a Soldier, Kirshner depicts an internal war, the underlying energies of the human being. Building on these images, my artistic practice depicts the flux of the human psyche, plus its deconstruction, both of which are crucial to the reconstitution of the self.

            In my studio, I refer to Jenny Saville in her colour mixtures of flesh and energetic mark making. I respect her tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. The colours in her strokes are both bold and meticulous, and she renders them in layer upon layer of paint, making it sculptural and at times wholly abstract (Richardson 4). I paint in overlapping layers in hopes to represent the complexity of the human psyche. From Saville, I have learned the importance of incorporating more flesh tones. This makes my subject matter more relatable and approachable.  Unlike Saville’s work, I focus on the deformed and fragmented human self, manifestations of human emotions and psychological processes. I divorce from Saville’s naturalistic depiction of “whole” human forms, depicted from real life models.  

            As I was walking through the Medici Palace, I was stunned by the work of Andre Commodi. He painted the Fall of the Rebel Angels. In front of me, lumps of flayed bodies are being tossed around in a dark demonic play, and the painting is left unfinished. Like Commodi, and other artists of the Renaissance, I take the non-finito approach. I like to apply paint in numerous layers using various different brush strokes; I allow the under drawing to peek through naked canvas, leaving some parts unfinished.  My way of painting is meant to mirror the multitude of layers in our psyche, expressing the human condition of chaos and internal struggle.  In Commodi’s painting I see the hidden turmoil and anxiety that cloud human perception.  A Mannerist, Commodi, had an urge to unleash suffering in order to make room for the spirit.  Commodi’s 16th century contemporaries looked at Mannerism and its revolt against naturalism as a spiritual crisis (Friedlaender 14), but I believe it was a spiritual revolution that catalyzed emotional expression in art.

            My painted knotted forms are allegories of codding and loving your repression as you would a child. Michelangelo’s Pieta was an allegory for Mary’s divine connection with Jesus; her act of cradling Christ’s body represents both her grieving for and acceptance of Christ’s death and its transformative potential for the human collective. While many artists and art lovers continue to find spiritual meaning in Michelangelo’s masterpiece, many others undoubtedly feel detached from this allegorical message given the various modes of intellectual thoughts and artistic practice that have since challenged the ways of Christianity has divided, rather than united, humanity. Although I have drawn inspiration from the Pieta, I realize that my own practice is more influenced by modern psychoanalytic interpretations of the self. My art might be seen as a contemporary allegory for human repression and healing in which the maternal figure cradles the abject parts of her self and renders them anew.

            I ask the viewer to surrender to the full play of what is ordinarily called the terror of the unknown. When you finally face these emotions and experiences, an ecstatic sense of freedom erupts. My art practice is the stage between the unveiling and the freedom. My objective is to invite the viewer to a passive receptive state, and to meditate on what knotted forms live inside them. One must dissolve this suffering by loving it as you would an infant. My art practice is a process of creation, which, like birth, begins as pain and turns into a child. My future ambitions will involve a more intense relationship with repression, and a will to untangle the knots. As a matter of course, this has extraordinary heuristic and transformative evolutionary potential for the human individual.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elger, Dietmar, and Hugh Beyer. Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art. Köln: B. Taschen, 1994. Print.

Friedlaender, Walter F., and Donald Posner. Mannerism and Anti-mannerism in Italian Painting. New York: Schocken, 1965. Print.

Jung, C. G. The Theory of Psychoanalysis. New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Pub., 1915. Kindle File.

Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Kindle File.

O’Reilly, Sally. “Monstrous Bodies.” The Body in Contemporary Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Print.

Richardson, John. Jenny Saville: Continuum. New York, USA: Rizzoli New York, 2012. Print.

Sholt, Michal, and Tami Gavron. “Therapeutic Qualities of Clay-work in Art Therapy and Psychotherapy: A Review.” Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association: 66-72. Web. 2 Feb. 2015. .

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