ask kitty
Vol 11
Alexandra F, Fort Worth,TX
How did a difficult moment in life bring about art later on? How can artists tap into their own healing Journeys?
Dear Alexandra,
A well timed question indeed. In one of my recent posts, I mentioned feeling exposed. Revisiting some of my earlier works coated me in a nervous shame. My God! What was I thinking?! It felt as if I had spoken my inner most thoughts and fears out-loud to a group of strangers. Thoughts and fears that I should be denying or at least hiding. It was as if the art was fueled ONLY by the difficult moments in my life. At the time I had no awareness of this exposure or I would have stopped making work. Fortunately, I was surrounded by an amazing collective who spoke to this deep part of me, added their own difficulties and together we blended them into a beneficial exorcism of our collective traumas.
I think the process of making art is in and of itself a healing journey. Tapping into the personal unconscious that creativity springs from is cleansing. It connects us so elegantly to the greater collective unconscious. It frees us from the trauma, frees us from the past and propels us forward to our futures.
Collective unconscious, term introduced by psychiatrist Carl Jung to represent a form of the unconscious (that part of the mind containing memories and impulses of which the individual is not aware) common to mankind as a whole and originating in the inherited structure of the brain. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Stay well,
Kitty