Today, with some level of minor panic, I came to realise that next week is my last week in residence. I fly out on the following Tuesday, giving me a few days to tie up loose ends, go to the pubs, and say my goodbyes. (Just typing that word put a lump in my throat.) With a sense of urgency and inspiration, after spending a week ruminating, I flew into the studio this morning and accomplished a self-portrait. Generally, I’ve decided to take my own (and others’) advice and mostly avoid discussing my work when I’m in process, but I can talk a little about the things I’ve been thinking about, and what led to making this work.
Since last weekend in Limerick, I’ve been actively thinking about self-portraiture and its implications. Five years ago, in this place, my entire body of work surrounded this concept I came up with, of being this delirious character who thought she was turning into a bird. All of my work was avian, with self-portraiture woven into most of it. I thought, earlier last week, that perhaps it was time to do a proper self-portrait, right after I made the double-self portrait with competing animal natures as my shadows. (As you can tell, none of the works I’ve made have titles yet. That’ll come later.) But for some reason I felt like it would be a regression — how could I return to this beautiful place that gives me such inspiration, just to do the same exact work as before? What a waste that would be.
After viewing the show about artists’ responses to self-portraits in Limerick, I felt encouraged to continue in that vein. I thought about it for a long time — obviously, throughout art history, people have been making self-portraits. All of your famous artists have them; some made a whole career of being autobiographical (see: Frida Kahlo). I wondered what it was I had to say with mine.
As always, I was over-thinking it, drowning my intuition and inspiration in a sea of doubt and fear. Cue my life.
Once I forgot about thinking what meaning it would have, the ideas flowed again. More animal shadows? Straight-forward? Nude? And then I was thinking about what a self-portrait captures: a moment in time. A speck of your life that is unique in that moment, and will never, ever be the same exact moment, even half an hour later. People are always saying, “You look so different in all of your photographs!” In fits of vanity (and/or crippling self-loathing), when I look through photos of myself over time, I am often surprised that sometimes I don’t recognise myself. Other times, I am pleased to see that a photo captured me accurately. And more often than not, I cringe at the very same thing — a photo has captured me too well; this is the aspect of myself I dislike; I don’t want anyone to see me like this.
I took a bunch of photos this morning, trying to capture different facets of myself, and on campus, I printed them all out, leading to the work you (sort of) see here. Just an experiment, really, but I’m generally happy with it. I’m sure it will morph into something else conceptually as I think more about it. My musings here on self-portraiture are not what I would call my most eloquent, but bear with me as I use this blog as a doodle pad, in order to flesh out my thoughts. I’m actually eager to hear what other artists think of when they do self-portraits.
On one of Kate’s last nights here, Kate and Victoria and I had a really stimulating conversation about art in O’Loclainn’s pub, during which we discussed the merit of autobiographical work. As always, we referred back to our own work as a point of reference. Victoria stated confidently that even though she was photographing other people, all of her work was autobiographical. I had to agree for myself as well, and as we sat, alternately talking and musing into our wine glasses, I thought about that concept.
“Can art be un-autobiographical?” I asked.
For myself, at least, my work has always been autobiographical, self-referential, personal, emotional. My personal challenge is determining whether the kinds of things I experience and endure and subsequently depict in my work are universal enough, or at least empathetic enough, that a wider audience who doesn’t know me can be intrigued and moved by it. Since I’ve come here, I’ve conjured up the word “haunted” as the go-to for what I want my work to do. It may not sound like much, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a stated purpose in what I hope to achieve in the mind and eye of my viewer. I decided, week one, after looking at the swell of work I had created in my first few days, I want people to be haunted by this. That is my personal mark of success.
I’m sure grad school will want more than that, but I’ll have time to expand on that later. At the root of my feeling, that is the goal.
In real-world news, I’ve completely run out of money for art supplies, so I’m borrowing (read: not returning) bed sheets and scraps of fabric and using those to make work. I will probably have to shell out for a tub of gesso, though, because there’s really no effective way to manipulate dry media on a tacked-up sheet; at least, not in the way I’d like. This last piece was made on a thin fitted mattress sheet, which is kind of ironic because when I come home, I have this idea to work strictly on bed clothes. Fortunately, I have an abundance of ink and charcoal so it’s only a matter of finding a surface to work on that’s been hindering me. I should really call this last series The Gift of the Magi.
Oh, and my week as a performance artist? You can see that here, and here. There’s one more to go, but I have to work up the nerve to do it. Stay tuned.
The countdown starts here: eight days until the end of my residency.
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