Where does Art come from?

Where does Art come from? (And why am I a sculptor?)

Well, of course art comes from all sorts of places - so I will focus on where the kind of art that I am making comes from. The short answer to that is: the psyche.

What is that - Art from the Psyche?

I am making things through feel, resulting from internal experience. Spoken or written language can be very useful towards thinking about what I have done and communicating around it, but what I make does not arise from that direction.

In these times, art arising from concept has become very fashionable. The concept exists as a theory, constructed around differing depths of enquiry; if the viewer wants to understand the artwork they can read the accompanying text, and, with varying success, then construct a rational understanding to link with what they are seeing. The process is linear and intellectualised. I am not working like that. This is because the art that I am interested in is that which grabs me viscerally and pulls me in. It has to speak to me directly and emotionally, and that has to be about its immediate content, (and not dishonestly trying to evoke response by presenting me with something disgusting or shocking to react to. These are the tactics of someone who has either become cynical towards feeling, or else is too frightened to approach their own inner world.)

What do you mean - Art from the Psyche, then?

The psyche can be defined as the human soul or spirit, or the totality of the mind, both conscious and unconscious.

I make things because I am driven to; I need an arena to understand my experiences. What I have to explore arises from my psyche, and my process of manifesting it in physical form through kinaesthetic and visual means connects me to myself and helps me to process and resolve my understandings. The “art” that I employ uses metaphor to turn the feelings that I need to sift through into visual objects to engage with and contemplate.

Is that some kind of Therapy?

In this application, art shares roots and function with psychotherapy. To elaborate, in his book “Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art,” Gilbert Rose talks about the links between art and psychoanalysis. He says:

“The affinity between psychoanalysis and art … lies in the fact that each restores the original feelingful matrix of thought and perception; such re-assimilation of feeling to thought and perception, whether approached via the psychoanalytic or the aesthetic route, illuminates reality, but from an angle different from that of “objective” science.”

“Emotion is a subject on which art is especially qualified to speak because, if it has to do with anything, art has to do with emotional experience. One definition even has it: ‘One way of identifying a work of art {is as} an object made for emotional experience.’ (Kubler 1962, 80).”