Seven useful tools -- seek truth, not do-doing, be open, get support, learn from everything, cultivate a real love of self, have a practice.
déjà biting shallow space. i really enjoyed yesterday's autocorrect in which de-habiting was converted to déjà biting. there is something important in that somewhere i am sure. this morning though it seems to overlap or underlap with seeking truth or avoiding it.
truth | the forms i make often have strong gender specific bodily reference, typical feminine. somewhere in 2005/06 as i stepped into my own skin as artist, a shift away from designer, a shift away from invisible, these leadings became overtly evident. only once or twice, jokingly, did i set out to have that to be so. though initially i liked to believe my work came from trying on patterns i observed in culture and then unpacking how these played out with me, they ended up self referential in nature, it was definitely with the intent of analyzing culture, with a sort of self distancing built in. yet there is no distance, as a matter of fact the work is extremely intuitively autobiographical and unfortunately [?] highly public.
yet in terms of truth, i have not been able to truly unpack where within myself these repeating forms emerge and why they are repeated so often. i have inklings of maybes, threads i might tug and follow. i am not interested in living in a way that has me biting shallow space. it seems to find a deeper space i might follow these threads as to why these highly feminine forms [eeek. vaginas, folds, breasts, orficies. go away freud and klein!] keep manifesting in my work...it is a bit uncomfortable unpacking why one, this one, might make and publicly display such vaginal forms.
what the hell am i saying and to whom? i am pretty sure my work is largely a talking to myself, a trying to bite deeply, but i am not sure how to get there. but i must be attempting something more because the work and process are so public both in real space and cyberspace. am i making an assertion? a plea? a reveal? what am i doing? why?
a thread of subthreads...
relaxing into my own femininity sometime after the chrono reads 43 and occurring concurrently with a subtle grief of the losses as i approached the pause, a loss of biological and cultural femininity, i began making work in real space, three dimensional space. shoot right when i was just finding my own femininity i was loosing it. this relaxing into my own femininity, embracing it as an actual component of my identity was new. i previously was unaware of a conscious usage or dependence on my gender specificity. i would even say i intentionally submerged it. my parents in traditional gender roles worked to instill an independence in me, a gender neutrality. it was the heyday of full on feminist movement. my folks tried to raise a liberated she-child in a gender specific home. with little gap from that i married into a system in which men feared the feminine in response to historical familial systemic abuse, addiction, and dysfunction [redundant since the first two As cover it] -- the female feared. the subtle thinking and actions reinforced a gender neutrality that was already in the works within myself. to be female, to be feminine had negative and even detrimental ramifications, much in the same way to express emotion [a feminine trait?]. ha. though unnecessary financially, i worked from the onset of the union of 23 years because the unit clearly communicated if i did not, i would be like his mom [gracious wonderful nonworking woman who sat on boards at church, hospitals, and nonprofit do good organizations. the woman i knew was always striving to better herself, to be healthier, to love more deeply, to find god, to make a difference, etc. but like us all, the unit lived still with the alcoholic mother from his childhood, a woman long outgrown by her own hard work that i never met. i only knew her now version]. so combine my history, my inherent disposition, cultural context, with the unit's needs, an intentional and unconsciousness submersion of latching onto or attaching myself, my identity, behaviors, to the truly feminine was definitely playing out through childhood and the bulk of the marriage. yet an acceptance of my own femininity, relaxing into it with its concurrent fading has been definitely simmering to the surface--first in the non-languaged based form of making. my question is why? to what end? for what purpose? i am not interested in a simmering for the sake of simmering in the same way i am absolutely not interested in art for the sake of art.
i feel like i have bitten this before but haven't found depth of space within it. so now i will begin biting more tentatively...feeling for more threads...
identifying myself as artist, stepping into my own skin, is relatively new, making is not...
