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.