A Safe Place

The holding back of using the human form in my practice has, in affect, taken me back to ‘little boxes’. It has opened my mind and brought to the forefront some very important basic feelings.

In the previous blogs monoprints, I started to explore the fear of being trapped in a night terror. Of being in bed at home but it feels like a scary place. Of being trapped inside ‘the box‘ and not knowing how to get out.

I feel like I’m starting to answer my own research questions, in that the images I’m creating were surprising but I can easily pick them apart and digest the revelations.

The use of the box or the house, feeling trapped inside, being claustrophobic and panicked. In a literal explanation, the part of my internalised trauma that released was the image of my father dragging himself, half naked across the floor in the early hours, unable to walk to the toilet due to the copious amounts of consumed vodka. As a 19 year old, with my brother away at university, this was a really traumatic image that clearly ingrained itself firmly in my memory bank. I closed my bedroom door and have had night terrors on and off ever since. The same reoccurring feeling of oppression, a darkness in the corner of my room creeping closer. I get trapped in my duvet and can’t move. I’m screaming out “dad“ but no noise comes out. A manifestation of feeling unsafe and unprotected.

On the flip side, the house represents family. I think I am seeing the symbolism as a loss of family and home. The feeling of not having a home to go back to for Christmas. No safety net.

Within my portrait’s, it feels different. I think they are about love. Love for my children and the family that I have created. I still feel the need to show pain and fragility. Fusing the pain of my past with the love of the present or expressing the protection and safety of a young soul.

The house is usually presented as a thin, scratchy black line. A dominant and foreboding structure on the landscape.

Since the monoprints, I have been experimenting with reverse print techniques on box boards. The whiteness of the gesso is important to me, maybe symbolic of empty space. White as a kind of therapy to the black line.

In these works I am seeing the house as a far off place, an isolated, unknown. The images are lighter with a fragility I have been searching for with my work.

The use of layering feels necessary. Gesso transfer, watercolour, gesso, scratching back, sanding back, more gesso. Line, pattern, photographic imagery.

The work is is not so literal. There is a freedom to the act of making. Much more to explore with these techniques.

These works are coming from a different kind of trauma and loss. There is no fear. They are about fragility and a sadness. Also love and memory.