Awakening and Emerging

A Sightseer's Guide to the Layers of My Self

Our personal identities are a series of layers, constructed by a multiplicity of things seen, felt, remembered and inherited. Just like a painting, where the initial textures from the first layers of paint affect all of the subsequent layers, our personal histories and buried traumas have a deep influence on who we are today. Multi-layered in process and meaning, the final surface of a painting is a fusion of concealment and revelation. Layers transcend their boundaries. It is in this moment of ambiguity, where new impressions assert themselves and sharp edges dissolve, that the painting begins to breathe.

This series of paintings maps the multi-layered, ineffable experience of my inner world; it is an unveiling of a self-protective cloak to explore what it is to be human with all our frailties evident.

Awakening

A synthesis of fragility and resolute expressiveness, ‘Awakening’ depicts a figure who carries with her the weight and pathos of existence. This is the existential predicament of someone who grew up in the wrong context, acutely aware of a situation that she could not imagine her way out of. Traumatised in captivity with no escape, a sense of impending doom looms in the shadows. Behind a façade of invincibility, she holds within a deeper knowing. This is a self that’s awake and aware, simultaneously begging you to come closer and warning you away.

Although parts of her remain frozen, time-capsuled in the essence of this place, she has continued to grow out of disruption. This is the triumph of durability, the refusal to be laid low or to yield. This is human determination operating against every kind of adversity. She will rise up.

You've Been Asleep

When I bring all of the disrupted and abstracted layers of my life together to see how they coexist, I realise that trauma has cut me off. It was a cutting off from myself and a cutting off from others.  The inner citadel that I have built is the tangible artefact leftover from a vandalised childhood. Kept underground with no sunlight, these unsteady foundations are both vivid and murky and it is here amongst the crawlspace whispers that trauma memories remain. These parts of myself remain dormant, pervasively unseen, cemented over many times and buried underground. They seep out through the sleeplessness and shadows, and although they can be contained, they are yet to be archived.

The adult figure in this painting is standing in the realisation of an apocalypse; the complete destruction of her world as it was once painted. The origins of the word apocalypse can be roughly translated as an uncovering and ‘the lifting of the veil’. Understanding the word apocalypse in this way, it is a revelation of something hidden, concealed and unspoken. It is the ability to look more closely within as well as without, in order to see more clearly the roots of strife and the sources of beauty. Rather than spinning away from the breakdown to reassembly as if it were a defeat, the invitation is to travel inside, to consciously enter the darkest places of our hearts and minds. 

Emerging

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”  

--Leonardo da Vinci

‘Emerging’ is about the desire to rise and to go beyond personal limitations and to be free from past experiences. It is never too late to change our narratives, to assign new meaning to what once was and to what may be. The more we look the more we see. There's always another layer that can be painted over, with different colours attached and shifting qualities of light. 

Maybe you can see me now. I am the one climbing toward the light, where there is room to breathe and permission to exist where I have always been.