Psysmograph
origins
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Unconscious thoughts, memories, desires and fears make our consciousness a kind of text in translation: the language of everyday life is subject to forms of editing, distortion, censorship, slippage, misinformation, translation, transposition and wordplay of which we are necessarily unaware. (Royle 20)
Moving forward with my work after the Inundated series, my aim was to isolate and identify certain moments in my day which felt particularly tense or uncomfortable and to document these feelings as authentically as possible. I was interested in capturing the essence of an anxious moment through a raw, spontaneous mark on paper. There would be no planning, no composing and no looking at the marks my hand would create on the page. The format that felt most appropriate for this kind of data collection was a small journal. I only used the journal when I specifically felt anxious, nervous, or a sense of dread. I would let my hand hold the pencil as tightly or loosely as felt right and marked the page with lines, scribbles and sometimes rips. On the back I would write the date, time and describe as best I could the type of feeling I was having at the time. I experimented with different media to make the journal entries on a larger scale, at one point working on a large scroll of drafting paper. The paper reminded me of the roll of paper in the examination room at the doctor’s office and the nurse rolls out a brand-new section of paper for you to sit on. I used the scroll in my studio in the same way where I only unrolled enough of the paper to cover my table, made my marks and rolled up the used part without looking at it. I continued this for three months until I finally unrolled the scroll entirely and installed the piece in a room where it spanned three walls to surround the viewer. This was the first time I saw my own emotions represented on such a large scale and in a way that created an environment of which I could be physically inside. Although I stopped recording my emotions in that larger format, I consider this foray into the world of automatic drawing to be foundational to my subsequent work. The original intentions of those who participated in automatic drawing in the past aligned with my own goals in drawing this way. I address this influence in the chapter on influences. I also felt the expansion of my work to a life-size scale gave my two-dimensional works on paper a more three-dimensional presence in a gallery with the capacity to immerse the viewer in the work and this played a major role in my future bodies of work as well, as seen below. |
Automatic Drawing
Automatic drawing can be described as “expressing the subconscious.” It is implied that one should draw randomly across the paper, without any rational thinking. There is no rational control at all. As a product, there is a drawing, produced by the subconscious with the goal to discover something about the psyche of an author. In case that the author uses ‘ratio’ or mind in his/her drawing, the subconscious would be repressed and no single link with the depths of a person’s psyche could be expressed. That is why channeling a spirit is one of the main goals of automatic drawing with a completely free hand "putting" psyche onto the surface. Finally, drawing automatically is inherently linked with automatism, which is an art-making process where the subconscious is allowed to create - hence the name automatic drawing. Of course, psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud influenced this method of art making a lot, particularly Freud’s theories about the conscious and the subconscious. (Pereira)
My works that include automatic drawing came from an interest to remove the element of thinking and planning in order to give my raw feelings a platform to exist. I was not aware of this genre of artmaking prior to trying it on my own, but once I learned about the purposes of automatism, the goals coincided with my own. In reflecting on the spontaneous, feeling-driven marks I made in my work, I found that the format in which I created the drawings affected the readings of them later. For example, the automatic marks I made as entries on separate pages in a journal felt like a definitive statement of my exact feelings for that moment in time. While the more intense emotions sometimes surface in this way, more often my daily life is a combination of feelings coexisting, shining and then fading into the background. To depict this sensation of multiple feelings at once, I was compelled to integrate the automatic mark-making into works that were already about other mental states. It was this idea that formed the basis for my most recent pieces of work, the Mind Map drawings. The Monthly Marks books were also experiments in blending automatic drawing with planned, composed marks. These raw, expressive moments as documented by these markings played a major role in both of these bodies of work in my thesis exhibition Psysmograph.
My works that include automatic drawing came from an interest to remove the element of thinking and planning in order to give my raw feelings a platform to exist. I was not aware of this genre of artmaking prior to trying it on my own, but once I learned about the purposes of automatism, the goals coincided with my own. In reflecting on the spontaneous, feeling-driven marks I made in my work, I found that the format in which I created the drawings affected the readings of them later. For example, the automatic marks I made as entries on separate pages in a journal felt like a definitive statement of my exact feelings for that moment in time. While the more intense emotions sometimes surface in this way, more often my daily life is a combination of feelings coexisting, shining and then fading into the background. To depict this sensation of multiple feelings at once, I was compelled to integrate the automatic mark-making into works that were already about other mental states. It was this idea that formed the basis for my most recent pieces of work, the Mind Map drawings. The Monthly Marks books were also experiments in blending automatic drawing with planned, composed marks. These raw, expressive moments as documented by these markings played a major role in both of these bodies of work in my thesis exhibition Psysmograph.
Mind MapsA revelation born out of the work from the previous two years in the graduate program was that my moments of depression or anxiety did not exist on their own, but instead were interlaced with other emotions at the same time. While episodes of depression tend to last longer than what feels like fleeting moments of anxiety, the wide range of mental states I experience can also last for differing amounts of time. I sought to create a piece that depicted this combination of feelings while also adhering to a process that reflected time. As seen in Plate 25, I drew an image of my bed sheet from during the pandemic, and as the drawing grew across the paper nailed to the wall, snapshots of moments of other emotions appeared in frenetic marks. Mind Map II, seen in the second image was the final piece created for this exhibit. The expressive markings do not combine with the drawing in this composition but instead are all placed above the bedsheet.
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Monthly marks
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Before the Fall semester of 2020, the idea of making art in the format of a book never really occurred to me. Then again, there were many things about 2020 that were incredibly new and unlike anything I had ever been through before. The pandemic turned my world upside down and when trying to process all of the chaos happening around me, my normal methods of artmaking did not seem appropriate. The concept of time and how it passed was completely distorted from my perspective because a long-term issue loomed overhead, making each new day unpredictable. This paired with the fact that certain major events were still taking place in my life throughout made for a very confusing period. My attempt to solve this problem came in the form of journals that had self-imposed guidelines. These limitations I placed were meant to offer a sense of control. Each journal was created with one spread per week of the month and each week was filled with marks made either from emotional moments, reactions to those marks or collage mixed media from the week.
One reason that the structure of a book stood out as an effective method of understanding time was because it inherently carries with it the concept of linear narrative. This feeling of predictability was what I was searching for when thinking of how to approach this problem of how to grasp the sense of time. The Monthly Marks journals displayed in Psysmograph can be seen to the left. The viewer will also notice two journals that are empty, representative of the times where I was unable to complete the ritual of coming to my desk to make an entry. These periods of inactivity are also a reference to the body of work, Refuge, where I explored depression as it manifested in my life. |
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