Hello Fellow Creative!
Last time we left off with an introduction to what I will be blogging about.
My intention is to get comfortable with the flow of writing and process the fleeting thoughts that pass through my mind while making work.
With this, I intend to hopefully write a book about my philosophies on mental illness!
With that said, let’s start…
🙂
I recently graduated college with my BFA and for my thesis, I explored the relationship between the way a flower blossoms to the way mental illness takes over one’s mind.
Can you visualize a flower slowly growing from a seed, and then as time passes, each petal drying and falling individually?
Below is an excerpt I wrote about the final installation I produced. So you can get an insight on how my current work has evolved.
Irina
It was a Sunday afternoon, November 4th 2007. My mother was sleeping, after a long weekend of not being a mother and indulging in her selfish needs. I waited for Irina all weekend because she promised me she was going to pick me up on Saturday, but never showed up. I assumed she decided to get high and forgot about me. When I heard a heavy knock on the door, I immediately thought, “she came,” and scurried to the door. When I opened the door, I saw my sister Diana sternly telling me to get dressed. I asked her why in frustration but she simply repeated herself with grief. As I was looking through the closet for something to wear, I overheard Diana waking up my mother and saying, “your daughter is dead.” That was the moment I found out Irina overdosed and I was never going to see my sister again.
I was only 11, but I knew Irina couldn’t handle her emotions. She suffered from bipolar disorder and I experienced a lot of her maniac and depressive episodes. I saw her high off everything you can think of, from heroine to painkillers. When I found out she finally overdosed, it suffocated my understanding of who I was and changed the way I adapted as an adolescence. My emotions felt too intense to handle and I no longer felt like I was a part of a family. Culturally, we are taught not to show our weaknesses so, as a teenager, I thought about suicide constantly. I couldn’t tell my friends or my therapists about what was actually happening inside of my mind and letting go of my sister took years before I finally felt like her death changed my life positively. After 10 years of analyzing and endlessly tormenting myself with anxious thoughts, I realized I needed to make artwork that embodied her spiritual essence, thanks to my first acid trip.
I tried LSD for the first time during Summer of 2017. Taking LSD influenced my visual understanding dramatically because of how heightened my senses became. My senses felt sensitive and in return my visual experience with painting became a lot more vulnerable. I started experimenting with LSD to further my understanding of what it means to be a painter both emotionally and physically. Naturally, I yearned to immerse and surround myself in nature in order to experience LSD to its fullest potential. So, observing flowers and the way they move with the wind, as if each petal was individually breathing allowed me to be aware of exactly what I wanted in my work; a seductive world for the viewer to mentally step into that is intense yet empathetic at the same time. Subconsciously, I knew my thesis work needed to be about mental illness when I saw a bunch of dead flowers alongside the living breathing ones. It reminded me of Irina and how her brain must’ve fell apart when bipolar took over her intuition.
I wrote this for my creative writing class one semester; our assignment was to write about a memory poetically under 200 words, forcing me to rethink how I actually felt.
“I first sensed my brain tingling. My thoughts were intensified. All noise became euphoric and precipitation took over my body. My soul became nature and my physical presence followed. My feet demanded to walk and as I stumbled along under the beaming sun, I experienced the life of a flower. Their emotions were spilling out. I smelled their elegance and watched them breath the air in, and then out. I soon remembered I was at the highline. With other humans watching. But. I was on LSD.”
After my first acid trip, I physically knew I broke the boundaries of social norms. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a Scheduled I drug, alongside marijuana, meaning it “does not” have any medical benefits whatsoever. However, from my personal adventures with the drug, it enlightened me rather than harmed me and helped me understand how important the tangible moment is. Approximately 45 minutes after I ingested acid, the back of my brain felt extreme pressure, as if it was going to explode. I am convinced that this was the process of my intuition opening up, becoming clearer and more sensitive to subtleties. People usually don’t pay attention to small details on a daily basis and with my senses on full awareness, it all connected to me. I crave to make my artwork into a stimulating experience by meticulously adding the smallest details possible in every inch of my work and keeping the viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
Immediately the next day, I had an urgent feeling that I had to materialize what I’ve learned about awareness through making sketches. I started creating abstract ink drawings of flowers and simultaneously asking myself, “How does losing one’s mind to mental illness relate to the way flowers blossom and then fall apart petal by petal and die?” I spent about two months thinking about this question before I started making paintings. My original idea was to create a tight room where people can walk in. I wanted to create the walls by attaching 18×24 inch oil paintings to one another and construct a roof like structure with blankets of crochet. I envisioned my work to be that way until I finished about 12 paintings and needed to start attaching them. I started struggling with where I wanted to go with my work when I saw that the paintings as a wall alone weren’t enough for the amount of impact I wanted. I wanted to overwhelm the viewer and represent the unwanted feelings of anxiety that mental illness produces. I decided that the paintings needed to stand on their own after attaching them, so I used Plexiglas as a structure for the paintings to lean on for support. By doing so, the paintings transformed into objects and symbolize the mind going through transition. The objects fall slightly forward, bending the Plexiglas and creating an impression that the yarn is pulling the objects towards the ground. This creates tension in negative space and relates to the struggle for balance in the mind. More importantly, turning my paintings into objects meant that I started relying on my physical body to produce work rather than only using logic to pick up a paint brush or palette knife and decide what my composition should be. This meant LSD didn’t only open up my mind, but helped me recognize that ultimately the body has full control and its our responsibility to develop an understanding about relationship between the body and the mind. Touch and my hands feeling the materials is a vital component in making the tactility of the work. Our minds register tactility with all of our five senses, and so I experimented with various materials i.e. latex, resin, yarn, sharpie, and beeswax in order to produce a successful sensual experience for my audience.
In addition, the wooden pallets I’ve found in the trash are painted with iridescent gold and a cool off-white to uplift the objects to eye level and compliment the harmonious color palette of warm hues that travel throughout the installation. The pallets give an organizational quality to the objects and mirror the rectangular structure of the clay boards and the sheets of latex that are vigorously sewn together. Yet, I disturb the balance of the pallets by tilting them while they’re hanging in space and conveying the illusion that yarn is spilling out of the suspended pallets and onto the floor. Is the yarn tugging the pallets down or are the pallets throwing up the yarn? – are questions that I myself want to keep ambiguous. The motif of the rectangular shape represents the rigid mind while the motif of obsessiveness and loss of control is shown through the strings of yarn breaking the organized shape of the rectangle. The repetitive act of drawing short small lines with sharpie unify the large body of work and depict a sense of OCD and neurotic state of mind. The movement of lines that resemble the complex motion of the brain are seen with a variety of materials from soft strings of yarn to very thick oil paint stroked with a palette knife. Within the objects, I create multiple layers with transparent resin for the viewer to psychologically step inside of the work. Resembling when a mentally ill person is stuck in a self-destructive mindset and feels trapped inside of a warped reality. I pour resin over living flowers and engulf them into a preserved world. This process takes away the breath of the flowers, similar to the concept of dying. I leave the damaged brushes I use for resin on the surface of the objects to indicate that someone has left work and will return. The use of both small and large sheets of Plexiglas corresponds to the transparency and feel of resin.
I use beeswax to oppose translucency and to make the work tactile and dense. One of the crocheted piece’s is emerged within latex, wax and resin and appears as if its disintegrating. My intention is for the viewer to feel the heaviness of the piece as it hangs with weight over one of the tilting pallets, similar to the dragging feeling of depression and falling apart. Long strings of yarn hang delicately from the heavy crocheted blanket and onto to the soft crocheted pieces that rest on the floor. Not only does the act of using yarn obsessively relate to anxious and uneasy feelings; it brings a gentle quality to the work. By putting piles of wax onto the soft material and hanging it as if there is someone beneath, the yarn looses the caring quality and becomes into an animal like form; another state of being opposite from rationality. In conjunction with the sensibility of beeswax, it is an important material in my culture because of its aromatic smell. When entering a Bulgarian church, the smell of beeswax candles takes over all of your other senses and is part of the spiritual experience. The color gold is an additional element that comes from my culture because both the interior and exterior of churches in Bulgaria are covered with real gold. The gold acts as a source of light when seen next to another color and is a subtle yet impactful color. At first, I wasn’t aware that using beeswax and the color gold came from my Bulgarian roots, rather it happened subconsciously throughout the process of making this work and opening my senses with LSD. However, the concept of spiritually and surpassing human existence while inside a church relates to my sister’s death and her breath moving past physical space.
If you’re still reading, thank you!
🙂
NOW let’s get to business.
I am interested in taking the foundation of my original thesis to create a body of work that explores the relationship between spirituality and mental illness a lot MORE further than what I once did.
With the first painting of my new series, Jungle Mind: Part 1, I included the psychedelic experiences I had in Palenque, Mexico. *inserts your favorite flower emoji*
The vibrations of the colors blowing through the jungle trees and all my sensations tingling inside; building my mind layer by layer… and
soaking in the energy of Mother Nature as time no longer concerned me.
Fully connecting my consciousness with the Universe.
This is the core element element of my work!
Multiple layers constructing the conscious mind. Adding and subtracting layers as I do with my paintings.
It’s ALL a process really. Both painting and getting to know your mind.
I am not interested in the subconscious because once you’ve explored your subconscious, you should take it into reality and allow what you’ve learned to evolve your spiritual awakened consciousness!
My paintings are references to the the complexity of the mind when it is surpassing the constraints of the subconsciousness.
I PERSONALLY believe that there is a thin line between a spiritual awakening and a psychotic experience. & I believe that you find yourself through that thin line.
How?
By breaking apart your mind and building it back up!
The thing is…
not everyone can build themselves back up.
Especially with the stigma of mental illness and how scared you feel when someone has told you something is “wrong” with you.
Most often times, people feel DEFEATED by their own mind when experiencing a spiritual experience that is intense; and you might feel like you’ve lost touch with reality.
When in actuality, you’ve become more in touch with yourself but just don’t know how to materialize it in today’s society.
Why is that in some cultures, spiritually in tune people are Shamans and in another culture those same spiritually awakened people are locked up in asylums?
How does our culture in America constraint spiritual awakenings? – is one of my biggest concerns within my work.
Societal constraints lead’s people to feel like they’re lost and without hope.
This is NOT true.
I would love for my both my physical artwork and my writings to one day BE that guide for the people who experience spiritual awakenings, but need guidance.
In the meantime, I am still developing the words to express my tangling thoughts by painting my butt off in the studio!
So, I hope you stay tuned for the evolution of my life’s work.
*You can see the painting, Jungle Mind: Part 1 on my Instagram.*
Yours truly,
Pamela