Kristeva in her book, “The Feminine and the Sacred” explores the creative potential of the unconscious in the work of two female artists. I identify this potential as a primary drive in my work.
Kristeva speaks of the unconscious as something of an ‘other logic’ or of ‘no logic at all’. She takes the example of nuns in the Middle Ages as ‘explorers of the un-nameable’. These nuns entered a creative process, described in the words of Kristeva, as being, “in league with the experience of love. It (the process) entails passing through the nothingness of language, to obtain a bouquet of traces and sounds that challenge intellection, in favour of what they call the ‘paradise of love’. It seems to me, that that ambitious expression designates an act of giving a form to sensible flesh, a delicious act always to be begun again, but one that requires a certain annihilation of self, of self-consciousness.”
As discussed in my paper on page 5, direct access to the unconscious, is facilitated by my physiological makeup. The unconscious elements revealed through the material structuring of my work and the choice of subject matter relate to my medical condition, petit mal. Petit mal, in my experience is a condition triggered by an overload of ‘inner stress’ held in the subconscious, resulting an involuntary spasmodic state in the brain, with consequence that there is an inability to maintain a unified consciousness of successive thoughts. My brain momentarily enters a ‘sleep state’. I experience what Kristeva describes as ‘a challenge to intellection’, and the conscious thinking mind is fractured. At this point, my subconscious ‘takes control’, and I experience what I call a ‘timeless place’. The process of an episode reveals to the conscious mind the pure potentiality and expansiveness held beneath the conscious surface layer of words and linear thought. In my experience over time, this fracturing/ gap/ space/ silence or what Kristeva above refers to ‘an annihilation of self consciousness’, is what uniquely allows me access to my unconscious, wordless dimension, and is the seat of my creativity.
Kristeva writes of Hildegard (1098- 1179), a dynamic Medieval German abbess who founded a model cloister on the banks of the Rhine. She painted from her ‘extravagant visions’ exploring through her senses her un-nameable internal viscera. Kristeva writes of Hildegard’s extraordinary creative journey with explicit references to epilepsy.
“Hildegard is in the process of visualising the circulation of blood, she discovers it before our eyes! It is as if she also has an inkling of the flow of hormones: Listen to this:’ Kristeva quotes Hildegard- ‘ “Phlegm becomes dryer and more virulent, it rises to the brain, it brings on headaches and pain in the eyes; the bone marrow shrivels up, and sometimes there is an outbreak of epilepsy in the last quarter of the moon. When thoughts are overtaken by savagery, harshness and tyrrany……. They push knowledge to the point of despair, as in epilepsy, because the light of truth that illuminated it has already grown weak.’ ”
Kristeva honours Hildegard as “the precursor of modern medicine and of various ‘psychiatric’ techniques; her experience of the sacred is a battle against the invisible and the unspeakable. This is an extraordinary reflection on epilepsy, a ‘sacred malady’ which Hildegard compares to a science ‘pushed to the point of despair, since the light of thought has grown weak!’ Yes she balances on the ‘roof” of words, but perched above an ocean of suffering mucous membranes and convulsive humors.”
In my case, the somatic symptomatology in an episode is different from this description, however the resulting state of the psyche and the creative processes that result are remarkably similar. Kristeva admires a female painter who articulates subjective and extreme internal states. My practice is an exploration of similarly caused subjective somatic states. The material substrate of my paintings can be seen as a metaphor for the dynamics between the subconscious and conscious layers of my psyche as I experience it. In the paintings materials are pushed to a point of material and aesthetic reaction, internal tension and counter- tension. Forces of repulsion and attraction fracture and crack the surface of the work, similar to the tension between forces manifest in a geological fault line. I elaborate on my processes on pages 17 and 18.
Further to this Kristeva notes that the more recent Georgia O’Keefe was also inspired by ‘the un-nameable’. “In leafing through my old books…. I happened to lay my hand on an art catalogue by Georgia O’Keefe (1887- 1986) …. I adore the sober and sensual painter, her fleshy flowers, her visions of eggs, of wet bones and of skulls picked clean. Yet another modest explorer of the un-nameable…. She does not miss a chance to trace mysteries, but of what? Her body, a flower/ sex organ, the cosmos, being? Secretly, modestly, she moves about- she does not name but keeps quiet. And she draws. She does not draw what she draws, but something else in the thing itself; an insignificant thing, almost nothing, God knows what, but which is everything, or rather a ‘roof’ from which I see and sense what cannot be seen or interpreted and which seduces me. I try to say something about it, I cannot, I would have to write a poem, a novel ….”
In this paragraph, Kristeva acknowledges and speculates on aspects of O’Keefe’s work that directly relate to my choice of subject matter and material. My choices of subject matter also present what is underneath the visible and the named, the invisible and un-nameable unconscious, resting below the surface nameable conscious layer. The ‘Skull’ paintings and the ‘Vagina’ paintings both portray a quality of form that ‘mask’ and shield an underlying form, that which is ‘un-nameable’ as it is invisible. Similarly linear thought can be seen as masking the unconscious. At the same time the paintings do have fissures which allow an opening into the unknown, the expansive wordless space. The bones portray ‘stripped back’ form. I choose subjects that are ‘named’ yet reduced in order to reveal the ‘un-nameable’. The folds of the labia in the ‘Vagina’ paintings operate in a similar way, they are, perhaps, ‘traces of mystery’, in a similar vein to Kristeva’s response to O’Keefe’s work.
In conclusion, researching Kristeva’s writings and witnessing her ability to speak of the ‘unspeakable’ and the ‘un-nameable’ has allowed me to come close to grasping that which is un-graspable in my creative process.