At the Chelsea interviews I was asked a question that I anticipated, but was still at loss of answering. ‘What do you think your overall concept or theme is, in your work?’ As I delved back into the many processes I went though with medium and material, I struggled to grasp that bigger picture that was lurking behind it all. Then he turned to me and said, “To me, I think your work is very much set on the theme of trauma,” and that was when the bigger picture hit me in the face. I’ve been making work about trauma this whole time! it’s as if I was stuck in time, transitioning in and out of that traumatic mindset at unexpected times. I’ve always been making very personal art and pieces that place a lot importance in the raw emotion and concept behind it. When I look back at childhood, a lot of the memories I have are more or less full of chaos and unease. However I do cherish these pieces of my past as they made me who I am today. I liked the idea of them gradually fading away bit by bit, yet never disappearing entirely.
The bruised landscape and rabbit painting were the depiction of the ‘leftovers’ of my memories of the earthquake. However I don’t feel like I’ve addressed all the emotions or other aspects of my childhood fully, and I want to transport back in time and address it full on, since I’ve just brushed it off as a child. The closure never occurred. I feel that I would close that chapter in my life just a little bit more in the FMP, but certainly not block those experiences out entirely because they’ve already become part of me today. I can never view the world differently after a certain point. In a sense, I want to let that chaos out in the form of paintings in the FMP.
Since a lot of the experiences from childhood caused quite a bit of fear, I thought about my own fears I have today. Taxidermy is one of the main ones. Being dead and stuck in time, it is almost like the feeling of being trapped in that traumatic experience, reliving that day again and again. Not being able to move, help others in need, or say anything out loud. I would sometimes become mute when I have flashbacks of the incidents. That is why I am still thinking of the anthropomorphic concept from the ‘leftovers’ project, and how I want to use animal/beast-like figures again, which I incorporated into the ‘transcription’ project also. I feel that animals are such a great tool for conveying raw emotions in film and literature, and the idea of ‘dehumanising’ someone naturally leads to the ‘animal’.
I began to drop my thoughts down about the ‘trauma’ concept in the form of a mind map. I also thought of other references I could take into that, for example the poem ‘The Devil’s Wife’, based on the Moors Murders, and wondering if that was a traumatic experience for Myra Hindley even though she was an accomplice. Did she have painful flashbacks as well or was she proud of her contribution? It is a very twisted concept, taking someone’s life away completely...it’s bound to leave a permanent mark etched into you. Or was she a complete maniac, psychopath and is so tainted with this chaos that she cannot return, feel guilt, or grieve for others? I guess everyone reacts to the same situation differently, I wonder how I would have handled the situation.
I also looked at the possible symptoms that could arise from experiencing a traumatic event, which I will definitely bring into the painting as well.
