A Possible New Work Ethic For Me

This was sent from Sol Le Witt to Eva Hesse in 1964 but I think this should probably be the way froward.  So no more Facebook procrastination, no more 'I can't', this is it..... creative production here I come!

'You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it.  Don't!  Learn to say 'Fuck You' to the world once in a while.  You have every right to.  Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose-sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eying, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself.  Stop it and just DO.'



Hesse's art is often viewed in light of all the painful struggles of her life including escaping the Nazis, her parents' divorce, the suicide of her mother when she was ten, her failed marriage and the death of her father.  She also always felt she was fighting for recognition in a male dominated art world.  Given the contrast between my life and hers, what am I complaining about?  What is stopping me?  Or is it that the struggle feeds the artistic process - just another excuse for procrastination, I fear!

So all that is left now is for me to read Foulkes, Bion and Nitsun by the end of this weekend, understand group psychotherapy sufficiently to write 1500 words on my experiences within a process group and plan my clinical study report - Stop it!  Just DO......

So where have I been?

It is a very long time since I wrote on my blog and I really think it is high time that I got my act together.  I began an MA in Art Psychotherapy at Roehampton University in the autumn and that has really informed my work as time has gone on.  I am still creating quite fragile, layered pieces but the emphasis has shifted from the landscape to the container.  A reference to Bion's theory of Projective Identification. 

For Bion containing is not passive. It is a complicated partnership with a variety of interactions between the partners in this dynamic, mutually influencing relationship.  The main idea behind Bion's theory is one of 'Balance of Mind'.  In different relationship the dynamics  vary.  In one in which the container is too rigid, refusing to respond to what it has in it.  Here the contained will lose both form and meaning.  In a more flexible relationship, the contained enters the container and impacts with it, modifying its shape and function whilst also altering the contained, each mutually influencing the other.  A third type of relationship is one where the contained is so powerful that the container is completely overwhelmed, losing its own form and function. If you relate this to the relationship between mother and infant, a rigid mother takes in information from the infant and and utters responses which give no clear understanding of the infants trouble.  A fragile mother will go to pieces and panic. In either case the infant receives back its own projection with the implicit message that after all, as it feared, its state of mind is not tolerable. It suffers, in Bion's terms, a 'nameless dread' - i.e. a state of mind that is not thinkable.  These are the sorts of relationships that I am trying to represent in my containers.