No direction home. Just passing through

Catherine Kennedy

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts

U.N.S.W Art and Design

31st August 2015

Acknowledgements

It’s been a long and winding road and there are many I might thank.

Louise Fowler-Smith for the final miles with unfailing optimism.

Sally Clarke for the long haul and the hard yards.

Gary Carsley for the embarkation.

Jen and Rob Herbertson, Helen Kvelde, Stephanie Murphy for unending support.

Daniel and Else, without whom none of it would have been possible.

The many friends who formed the cavalry when the going got rough.

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Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………... 6

Chapter 1 Symbols, metaphor, dreams and visual imagery………………………. 10

1.1 Metaphor

1.2 Dreams and the language of the unconscious

1.3 Myths, fairy tales and metaphoric narratives

1.4 Visual imagery as symbol and metaphor

Chapter 2. The house as metaphor………………………………………………… 25

2.1 The house image in dreams

2.2The ‘universality’ of the house metaphor

2.3 The ‘unheimlich’ and the interior

2.4 The house image in film and literature

2.5 The house image in visual art

2.6. Withdrawing/venturing forth

2.7 Public and private dimensions of the house

2.8 The house and our material possessions

2.8 The house expresses itself in dualities

Chapter 3. Reality is a montage. Using composite imagery to create new narratives………………………………………………………………………… 45

3 3.1 The alluvial narrative. Reality is a montage

3.2 Dominant narratives and the intersection of viewpoints and levels

3.3 Retextualising existing images

3.4 The composite image painting

3.5 The montaging of images in the songs of Bob Dylan

3.6 Artworks based on the combining of images/ personal explorations into the composited image and pictorial space.

Chapter 4. The structure of self. Homeworld and the ‘In my mother’s house project’ 66

4.1‘Homeworld’ and the formation of self and identity

4.2 In my mother’s house project

4.3 Individual works In my mother’s house project

4.4 Rebuilding/remaking the house of self.

4.5 The authentic self and making genuine choices

Chapter 5. At home with myself, at home in the world……………………………. 87

5.1 Home and identity

5.2 House as a mirror of self

5.3 Being “at home”

5.4 Structure or framework of home

5.5 Cultural differences

5.6 Childhood home

5.7 The project “Bringing it all back home”

5.8 The duality of prospect and refuge/ coming in, going out

4 5.9. The journey home

Chapter 6. No direction home. Just passing through……………………………… 105

6.1 Seeking home in postmodern times

6.2 The underlying duality of the ‘self’

6.3 In my daughter’s house project

6.4 No direction home

6.5 The hallway

6.6 The project - No direction home/just passing through

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….127

5 Introduction

My project is located at the intersections of the formal studies of psychology and architecture. Louise Bourgeois envisioned the body as house; I am by extension articulating the house as a metaphor of the human psyche. The basis of this idea is outlined by Gaston Bachelard in his influential text The Poetics of Space (1969) in which he speaks of the house as a principle of psychological integration, a tool for the analysis of the human soul, a topoanalysis for the psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives, exemplified by Bachelard’s systematic and associative linking of parts of the house to personal attributes: the attic that speaks of the higher self, of mental activity of our aspirations; or the basement or cellar that implies the dark, the hidden, the unconscious, the subconscious, repressed/unacknowledged desires, and the hidden self.

There were a number of source points for the project such as recurring dreams involving houses, an interest in psychology and the nature of the mind; noticing how often the house motif appeared in my work and so on. Ultimately there was the realization that the idea of the house provided a structure for the things I was interested in investigating such as the nature of the self, how the self establishes meaning, and the integration of the conscious and unconscious self.

Chapter 1 investigates the way that representational images can be used as a symbolic visual language and can be a means of integrating conscious and unconscious thought.

Chapter 2 examines in detail the idea of the house as a metaphor for the self, which is the basis of this project. I discuss the way the house can be contextualised as an act of portraiture and look at the way this visual image is used in literature and film as well as how it has been a means of exploring the psyche in contemporary visual art practice.

In chapter 3 I explain my process of combining and layering images to produce an alluvial narrative. I discuss the notion of reality as a montage and the process of creating meaning by finding new associations between things. I look at the way composited imagery has been used by other artists to bring together different realities such as the external world and the world of ideas.

Chapter 4 considers the ‘Homeworld’ display village as a metaphor for the construction

6 of self and identity in contemporary society, utilising ideas around templates, facades, floor plans and package deals to discuss ideas around the ‘acquired’ vs. the consciously constructed self.

Chapter 5 looks at the way home and identity are intertwined and the way that the house is both an internal concept and also something that we act out on the world: a mirroring if you will. Notions around the authentic self are explored in relation to the idea of being at home and the search for meaning in relation to the narrative of seeking home.

Chapter 6 considers the question of how the ‘self’ might find meaning in the context of postmodern uncertainty and fear of the future, and looks at the notion of finding ‘the way home’ in the absence of maps or directions. I consider the house’s underlying duality between ‘venturing forth’ and ‘abiding safely within’ in concert with the duality inherent in the ‘self’ between reflection and projection. I consider the sites of interchange between inside and out such as doors and windows, and finally I explore the hallway as a site of transition.

My practice has undertaken 4 projects: Bringing it all back home, In my mother’s house, In my daughter’s house and finally The hallway project which became No direction home. Bringing it all back home, the first project, is the starting point of the investigation and asked the questions Where am I? How did I get here? Essentially it involved an investigation into the childhood home and family of origin. Reaching up into the attic, and going down into the cellar, represents investigating the thoughts, dreams and aspirations of the conscious mind as well as the fears, guilt and submerged memory of the unconscious.

The childhood home is where we form our essential self. This piece implies the dual nature of reflection via the pods that are lit from within, and shining out, as well as the mirror of the base that is reflecting back, repeating image and experience; looking into the past, becoming the future.

In my mother’s house examines building or constructing the house of self; identity formation; the construction of persona; and the nurturing of the private self. Here I considered nature/nurture aspects, imprinting, the self within society and culture and the conscious construction of the self vs. the acquired self. These questions led to research

7 around the nature of freedom and choice. In particular I considered whether the individual is actually capable of making real choices or whether we are always affected by the constraints operating on us. I considered notions of renovating and rebuilding in relation to the ability of the self to effect real change.

In my daughter’s house considered understanding the self through relationship and how others can reflect back aspects of our self to us. It looks at the projection of ‘the self’ forward, of one’s part in the formation of another, of both being mothered, and, in the fullness of time, becoming mother to another. It involved seeing from both sides, being both subject and object, looking out from the self and looking back into the self. The meaning of reflection kept coming up, both in the sense of mirroring, echoing, repeating and in the sense of considering, meditating on, imagining and dreaming.

A dual nature of home began to emerge: the house we dream about and the house we build. I started to see that home was both an internal construct as well as an external one. From my ‘house sitting’ experience I saw how much each person’s personal space reflected aspects of who they were, while from my dreams and from meditation I could reflect on subconscious perceptions on the nature of self. The understanding of self that is gained by looking inward needs to be balanced by the understanding gained from observing one’s actions in the world. I became unsettled about this duality as well as my inability to tie down notions of house and self. The idea of the house as a space that nurtures and protects us (Bachelard’s space for dreaming) conflicts with the idea of house as a space from which we view/look out onto the world. The house must both protect and inspire. We form ourselves from within, and that inner self needs to then project itself out into the world.

I started to see the house/home/self as a site of flux, a space that encapsulates a constant in and out movement like breathing: taking in/giving out; coming home/going out; reflecting on the past/moving into the future. The house of self is where the exchange takes place and for me the hallway represents the idea of a place of transition between these two states. The hallway leads us in and takes us out and thus encapsulates a state of ‘betweenness’. This site of transition became the focus of investigation for my final project.

I began the final project investigating ideas around Coming home/searching for home/finding home, the quest for the authentic self, the hero’s journey, the search for the Promised Land, Buddhist (and other) concepts of self-realization…and the

8 challenge of finding/creating one’s own place, song, or task. We must set out in order to return. And there are no real guidelines as to the direction we should take: either out or in. Thus the title of my final project took its cue from Bob Dylan’s “Like a rolling stone” and Martin Scorsese’s film about Dylan: No direction home.

9 Chapter one

Symbols, metaphor, dreams and visual imagery

This project investigates the way that representational images can be used as a symbolic visual language and can be a means of integrating conscious and unconscious thought. The symbolic visual language of the unconscious operates via the use of metaphor and most commonly makes itself known to us via dreams. Dream narratives are generated by the unconscious mind when the restrictions and filters of the conscious mind are turned off in sleep. This project proposes that the associations, connections and metaphors of our sleeping narratives speak in a way that is essentially meaningful. Dreams, art, myths and fairy-tales all use this same metaphoric language. Art, in all its forms, relies on metaphor. This project explores this unconscious language as a way of finding meaning and making sense of experience.

The language of the unconscious seems to be essentially pictorial, communicating mainly in images rather than words. It is a symbolic language based on metaphor and association. Metaphor extends meaning by using concrete objects and things in the physical world to stand in for feelings, ideas and abstract concepts. Conceptual metaphors (such as the house as a metaphor for the self) open up an almost infinite field of sub-metaphors (such as interior and facade, attic and cellar, doors, keys, locks, cupboards) and thus provide a way of thinking about difficult and complex ideas. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) use the example of “ideas are food” to show the way that food concepts such as swallowing, digesting, devouring, and being nourished by, ‘can give us a way of understanding psychological processes that we have no direct way of conceptualising’ (Lakoff and Johnson, p148).

Narratives of the unconscious tend to work on a “global” (holistic) and associative level, while everyday thinking is more linear and directed. This language speaks across the boundaries of rational thought, emotional response and conscious awareness.

1.1 Metaphor

Language is constantly being extended by metaphor. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980)

10 point out, this can occur without us even recognising it.1 Meaning is further extended when a particular metaphor or association, such as the tree (of knowledge), functions as an umbrella concept or metaphor, allowing for the development of many sub-metaphors (such as branching out, out on a limb, getting to the root of the matter) (Davies 1998). The sets of resonances created by invoking cultural/historical associations2 or by invoking particular qualities, are called the multivocal or polysemic nature of symbols, where one meaning is related to others in an increasingly deep pool of meanings, available for interpretation by future interpreters. (Turner, 1967, Turner and Lakoff, 1989).

Symbols, both literary and visual are not arbitrary, but possess a peculiar appropriateness arising from their physical features, historical significance and personal associations. We might, for example, understand emotions through the metaphor of water. Water may be deep or shallow, rough or smooth. Water may be flowing in a river, still in a lake, stagnant in a swamp, hidden deep in a well, vast and powerful in the ocean and destructive in a flood or tsunami. Water moves with tide and wave and we may be swimming, floating sinking or drowning. We may be on the shore, in a boat, or crossing over on a bridge. The image of water can thus be used as a physical manifestation of ideas about emotion.

1.2 Dreams and the language of the unconscious

Freud, Jung, Fromm, Bergson, Bettelheim, Lakoff, (and others) have explored the nature and use of this symbolism in dreams, metaphor and unconscious ideation.

According to Freud (1976) we do not dream anything that is not an important expression of our inner lives. All dreams can be understood provided we have the key. Freud defined the mind’s method of creating a dream, the dream work. The dream work is completely different from conscious thought in that it does not calculate or judge but rather gives things a new form. He also pointed out that this new form is almost exclusively visual. It recasts thought and feeling into visual form. Although we might

1 We may use the directions up and down to talk about emotional states, for example, or describe our hearts as being ‘broken’. From a ‘sea of grief’; to a ‘black sheep’; to ‘plain sailing; layers of meaning are constantly constructed by the metaphors that are available as sanctioned by common usage. 2 E.g. the tree of life in Middle Asian and Turkish mythology, or the tree of knowledge of good and evil that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or the qualities of particular trees e.g. the willow, weeping and bending, or the oak’s strength and longevity.

11 on rare occasions hear a voice speak or smell a particular odour, dream narratives consist almost entirely of visual images.

Bergson (1914) proposed that we forget nothing and that what we remember is but a small fragment of the totality of our memory. In dreams, however, when the gatekeeper of consciousness is turned off, we have access to everything we have ever experienced, thought or felt, thus the mind can make associations we would not in waking life make.

Erich Fromm in his book “The hidden language” (1951) gives numerous examples of dreams that seem to be predictive (e.g. a dream of being embezzled by a trusted business partner; an event that later actually occurs) but which can, in fact, be seen to be the unconscious mind’s perceptions (“this person is untrustworthy”) trying to break through the logical surface narrative (“everybody says he’s a good bloke”) (p 36-39).

Carl Jung (1964) contributed significantly to the understanding of dream metaphor in his observations regarding the intrinsic relationships between symbols and the ideas that they represent. He also developed ideas around the therapeutic possibilities of dreams. His theory of universal symbols or archetypes proposed a set of visual symbols that humanity held in common. For Jung, it was the ‘higher self’ or the ‘soul’, seeking individuation or enlightenment, which speaks to us in symbolic narrative in dreams. While symbols such as the sun and moon, king and queen, water and fire, might be used in a similar fashion across various cultures and time frames, Jung does not take sufficient account of cultural and individual difference, or of personal experience. 3 However the idea that wild animals might generally stand for untamed passions or that a volcanic eruption could be emblematic of disruptive change has a satisfactory logic.

Fromm (1951) proposed that we have a system of unconscious ideation of a symbolic nature and observed that this “universal” language was common to metaphor, myth, fairy-tales, and dream symbolism. The “ruling logic” of this symbolic language is “intensity and association”. Symbols take various forms, and Fromm made a distinction between the conventional, accidental and universal symbol. (Fromm, 1951, p15) Conventional symbols are like the word standing for the object or a red cross to indicate a hospital. The accidental symbol occurs because of association, as in the example: “In Paris we had a sad time”. Paris comes to stand for sadness. The accidental or associative

3 Moreover, many find his notions around the soul difficult (see for example “Modern man in search of a soul”) Nevertheless Jung’s contribution to 20th C thought has been significant and lasting and has been absorbed into much that is now the basis of self development theory and “new age” philosophy in general.

12 symbol can thus be entirely personal. The universal symbol is one in which there is an intrinsic relationship between the symbol and that which it represents and thus its use and interpretation may be accessible to many.

“I believe that symbolic language is the one foreign language that each of us must learn. Its understanding brings us in touch with one of the most significant sources of wisdom, that of the myth, and it brings us in touch, with the deeper layers of our own personalities.” (Fromm, 1951, p, 10) and “the dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read” (p127)

Fromm also says “we are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams, but we are also more intelligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.” (Fromm, 1951, p33). Fromm sees dreams as much more than Freud’s mere expressions of the irrational, primitive strivings in us. Dream images are an important part of the process of creating narratives and deciphering meaning.

Evidence for the intelligence of the unconscious mind can be found in the many documented cases of creative inspiration as well as solutions to seemingly insoluble problems arriving fully formed in dreams (as I have personally, experienced.) 4. It seems likely that the unconscious mind is working away finding new connections while our conscious mind is at rest.

Mlodinow (2012) cites recent studies in neuropsychology showing that much of our perception is at a subliminal level. It would seem that our conscious mind focuses on the obvious and the relevant in order to operate efficiently in the world but a lot more information than we are consciously registering (such as body language, background features, similarities between this situation and another, and so on) may be quietly imprinting on our subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is, in other words, continually absorbing and recording enormous amounts of input, as well as constantly collating, associating and building new connections between all this data. Our unconscious mind can be seen, as Gamwell (2000) describes, as a kind of an overseer, that is perhaps more aware and more intelligent than our conscious mind. Integrating the conscious and unconscious mind is pivotal, therefore, in gaining self-knowledge and creating meaning.

4 Instances of this phenomenon include Elias Howe’s sewing machine needle; Otto Loewi’s chemical transmission of nerve impulses; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Paul McCartney’s Yesterday and James Cameron’s images for Terminator and Avatar.

13 Lakoff (2001) describes a system of conceptual metaphor that operates in language and thought. According to Lakoff, metaphor is a way of thinking. It involves understanding one domain of experience (e.g. love) in terms of a very different domain of experience, (e.g. journeys), so that we can say, for example, “we’ve come a long way” or “we’re at the crossroads”. Such conceptual mappings become a fixed part of our conceptual system to the degree that creative new versions of it (e.g. “we’re spinning our wheels”) are readily understood and they allow us to theorise/think in a practical way about the abstract relationship. (Should we try to fix it, or should we abandon the vehicle?) This system of conceptual metaphor also plays a critical role in the generation and interpretation of dreams, providing a natural way of relating concrete images to abstract meaning.

Lakoff (2001) differentiates between the unconscious of Freud (what is repressed), and the unconscious of cognitive scientists (a level of thought that we do not have easy access to or control over) and says that the larger part of thought is, in fact, unconscious (in the cognitive sense). He sees dreaming as a form of thought and powerful dreams as a form of thought that expresses powerful emotional content. Dreams are a way by which emotionally charged fears, desires and descriptions are expressed. Dream construction is a dynamic process that makes use of metaphorical correspondences to construct the image sequences and, by deciphering the metaphorical correspondences being used in any dream, we might better understand the dream narrative.5 Our metaphor system may be seen as a part of the grammar of the unconscious. The way our minds construct our dreams is common to all of us but any actual metaphor may be particular to the individual.

1.3 Myths, fairy-tales and metaphoric narratives

Myths, like dreams, offer a story. Couched in the form of a coherent and often historical narrative they actually express, in symbolic language, metaphysical and philosophical ideas. According to Fromm (1951) they describe the human experience as a story of purpose or meaning. Myths are not just describing outer experiences; these stories (such as Psyche’s journey to the Underworld, the journeys of Odysseus) 6 metaphorically

5 Clothing for example might metaphorically represent the way we present ourselves to the world; our car, how we get about in the world; or a meal how we feel emotionally nourished, and so on. 6 And I would add more modern tales such as The Lord of the Rings to the category of myths and legends.

14 describe inner experience, moral development, and progress towards enlightenment in a symbolic narrative7.

David Tacey’s recent (2015) book ‘Beyond literal belief: religion as metaphor’ proposes that religious narratives are similarly metaphorical. He says that biblical stories should not be read as an historical account but rather as narratives that resonate within, speaking in poetic language of spiritual realities.

Catherine Kennedy Catherine Kennedy Better to rule (2011) Salt (2010) Acrylic and photo transfer on canvas Acrylic on canvas

Images that are appropriated from the cultural narrative can bring forth a whole accompanying set of associations, which can then inform the other images. These narratives can become symbolic references in art and in literature, and make available the import and meaning of the original narrative to the current work. In Better to rule, Gustav Dore’s illustration from Milton’s Paradise Lost is combined with Milton’s text (Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven) to bring the implications of that allegorical piece to this painting, which is exploring notions of relationship and power. In Salt, the image of Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ feet (from Mel Gibson’s ‘The passion of the Christ’) is subverted to talk about bitterness, suffering and male/female relationships.

7 A significant in-depth study of myths, their cross cultural correspondences, and their meanings and interpretations is to be found in the works of Josef Campbell; The hero with a thousand faces (1949) The masks of god (1968); Myths to live by (1972)

15 When such images are combined with more personal or everyday images, we start to produce a narrative that is unique and capable of reaching beyond the individual references.

Fairy-tale narratives seem to function in a similar way to myths in the way that they help us to make sense of the world. These narratives are not consistent with ‘normal waking experience’, but they seem to function as an emotional or psychological parable. Bruno Bettelheim (1976) makes the case that fairy-tales symbolically represent deeper and more meaningful emotional narratives and thus provide a means for children to explore the possibilities of existence, to sort out complex feelings and to rehearse confronting some of life’s greater challenges. Bettelheim observes that fairy-tales deal symbolically with deep-seated emotional conflicts, existential dilemmas and processes of self-knowledge via a concrete story or narrative.

“If we want to understand our true selves, we must become familiar with the true workings of our inner mind. If we want to function well, we have to integrate the discordant tendencies, which are inherent in our being. Isolating these tendencies and projecting them into separate figures”… “ is one way fairytales help us visualise and thus better grasp what goes on within us” (Bettelheim, 1976. p.97)

A number of fairy-tale plots begin with children being cast out. The motif of the children being sent out into the world or deserted in a forest (as in Hansel and Gretel, Babes in the wood, Brother and sister)8 raises the idea of the conflict between the desire for independence and the anxiety about having to rely on one’s own resources. Essentially, being pushed out of home seems to stand for “having to become one’s self.” “Self- realisation requires leaving the orbit of home, an excruciatingly painful experience fraught with many psychological dangers. The psychological risks in the process” “are represented by the dangers the hero encounters on his travels” (Bettelheim, 1976, p70)

Often the wanderers come across a little cottage in the wood. It may be empty or it may contain fearful or magical inhabitants (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and so on.) The wanderers seek shelter there. They encounter new experiences within the house, thus gaining knowledge. The forest seems to represent a kind of a wilderness. Like the world without, and the unconscious within, it is vast, unmapped, dark and dangerous. It contains wild beasts that wish to devour us, and

8Tales from the brothers Grimm

16 occasionally gentler, intuitive creatures (such as bird, frog and deer) that, if treated kindly, may become helpers or show us the way. Distinguishing between friend and foe, right and wrong, this way and that, is a constant theme.

The image of the ‘little cottage in the wood’ and the theme of leaving home/trying to find home are motifs that appear in the work “No direction home”. This three-part piece also incorporates the uneasy tension between comfort and fear that we often experience in fairy-tales. The wolf dressed up as the grandmother in “Red Riding Hood” for example embodies that overlap between the familiar and the terrifying, the recognition of which often precedes a realisation. These references thus imply a background metaphor against which the piece might be read.

Catherine Kennedy No direction home Tap gallery install 2015

No direction home in fact references a number of different fairy-tales (Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel) as well as the legend of Romulus and Remus, in exploring the question of how we might find the way (meaning), without maps, where nothing is what it seems, and where seeking to fulfil our needs and wants may lead to unwanted consequences.

Paula Rego’s paintings also resemble visual fairy-tales in the way that they have a strong narrative element, strange characters and a sense of underlying morality or

17 meaning. They also embody that uneasy edge between heimlich and unheimlich9. Her work has a strong symbolic resonance, and images drawn from dreams, real life, fairy- tales and horror film seem to overlap and collide. She says her paintings are stories and that the purpose of those stories is to give an explanation of the world, so that we can make sense of the world (indeed for her to make sense of her experience and fears). Her ‘stories’ like fairy-tales or fables, are psychic narratives, containing dark secrets, murky mythologies, and hidden truths of family life. Themes of fear, bullying, powerlessness, exclusion and other shadowy aspects of human relationship (to which many of us might relate) are often evident.

Paula Rego The family, 1998 Paula Rego The dance, 1988 © Paula Rego © Paula Rego Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

1.4 Visual imagery as symbol and metaphor

Recognisable representational images can be combined in ways that generate alternative narratives. Familiar images can call on a wealth of associations and resonances. Such images do not necessarily imply one direct symbolic interpretation. For example, images of animals often appear in the paintings in this project.

9 For a discussion of the notion of unheimlich and its importance in my discussions of the house metaphor, see Chapter 2 the house as metaphor.

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Catherine Kennedy Catherine Kennedy Catherine Kennedy Moth (Detail of Just looking, Cat (detail of Not at Home, 2014) Fox (detail of Toast, 2012) 2014)

The cat, for example, embodies paradox and contradiction. Within the cat, the wild and the tame exist in paradoxical accord (Ronnberg and Martin, 2010). Cats can be seen as tame, domestic and cuddly on the one hand and cruel, self-serving, aloof killers on the other. A cat lives in the moment, it is quiet and self-contained and it defines the terms of its own domestication. Cats come and go in stealth and can strike with lightning speed. Creatures of the night, they can see in the dark. Metaphorically they hunt in the dark and bring things back into the light of day. They traverse the dark and the luminal. In Christianity, cats are associated with the subversive power of the devil. In stories they are witches’ ‘familiars’ and are often related to the idea of a muse, to creative energy, and to psychic ability.

Similarly, the fox is a trickster and (in Japanese mythology) is a shape shifter. Its cunning is legendary. It is a thief and an outlaw, elusive and transformative.

The moth transforms like a butterfly but is seen, by comparison, to be ugly and negative. It is a creature of the dark with a self-consuming attraction to the light. It can swarm and cause terror. Its fluttering speaks of inconstancy fragility and transience. Moths can cause spoilage and decay.10

When I talk about images operating symbolically, I do not mean that one thing equals another, such as an image of a cat means ‘good luck’ or ‘aloofness’ nor do I imply the simple interpretations found in books and websites about “the meaning of dreams” (e.g. “to see a cat in your dream symbolizes an independent spirit, feminine sexuality,

10 These interpretations are from Ronnberg and Martin’s excellent book which draws together art, myth, poetry and so on to show the many associations and metaphors of visual images

19 creativity, and power.” (www.dreammoods.com) Rather, there is a deep well of associations, obvious and subtle, personal and shared, that we might intuitively draw upon, when encountering the cat image, and that the cat’s particular demeanour and context will be part of any interpretation.

The way that symbolism and metaphor form the basis of the visual imagery of painting and dreams is not just by simple correspondences between metaphor and image. The discussion might also include the ‘slippery’ notion of poetic imagery. Bachelard, in his introduction to ‘The poetics of space’ (1969) devotes many pages to explaining the way that poetic imagery is much more than simple metaphor. He speaks of: resonances and reverberations; of the way the real and the unreal are made to cooperate; of the phenomenology of the soul; of the relationship between dreaming and reverie; and of the necessary receptivity and co-operation of the audience. (Pp. xv-xviii) The poetic image is creative, and ‘through this creativeness, the imagining consciousness, proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin’ (my emphasis) (Bachelard, 1969, xx, Introduction).

Importantly, it is the relationship between objects and symbols within the narrative that is significant: it is the way images are associated, woven together into a narrative that creates the image and gives us meaning. In both ‘Don’t lose that number’ and ‘Pearls’; what we see appears to be a scene from a larger story. The imagery implies a dark or psychic narrative, a scary movie, a bad dream or nightmare: the kind where one is lost or pursued, where one needs help or is trying to hide. The viewer may attempt to piece together the rest of the story but essentially the images are relational and resonant and the various elements combine to create a ‘situation”. They talk of a situation that is emotionally charged, with confusion, fear and vulnerability; a situation that resonates deep within our psyche and one to which each of us may relate in various ways.

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Catherine Kennedy Don’t lose that number (2012) Pearls (2014) Acrylic, photo-transfer, stencil on canvas. Acrylic, photo-transfer, stencil on canvas.

The process aims to further understanding, make sense of the world and integrate the conscious and unconscious self. Like fairy-tales, we enter the story; the private becomes public and the unspeakable and the hidden become visible in a disguised form. The language of unconscious ideation enables us to weave narratives, to give actuality to abstract ideas, to give form to deep emotions, to make a story, to enter and gain some kind of access to our deepest psyche. The associations and relationships emerge to form a narrative. This narrative emerges during the process of creation and is not the recording of a story already written. Unconscious ideation is invoked in a conscious striving for a narrative to emerge.

Importantly, meaning can be seen as something to be created, as much as found. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, in his important book “Man’s search for meaning” concluded that making sense of our experience is everything. That “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” and “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” Furthermore, meaning is not something outside of us, but something that we must create. “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” (Frankl, 1963).

21 Like Lakoff’s love is a journey metaphor, my psyche is a house becomes a conceptual mapping that allows for infinite combinations, associations and meanings. By combining visual imagery that uses this language of symbolism, association, cultural reference, metaphor and conceptual mapping, narratives might be formed that investigate the nature of ‘the self’ and the way the self might create meaning.

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References

Bachelard, G. The poetics of space. Beacon, Boston, Mass, 1969.

Bergson, Henri. Dreams, Translated by Edwin D Slosson. B.W. Heubsch, New York, 1914.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The uses of enchantment. The meaning and importance of fairy- tales. Penguin books, Middlesex, 1976.

Bogart, Greg. Dream work and self healing. Karnac books. London, 2009.

Campbell, Joseph. The hero with a thousand faces Princeton University Press, 2004

Davies, D. ‘The evocative symbolism of trees in Cosgrove, D and

Daniels, S. (Editor) The iconography of landscape Cambridge University press, Cambridge, 1998

Frankl, Viktor. Man’s search for meaning; an introduction to logotherapy. Beacon press, Boston, 1963

Freud, Sigmund. The interpretation of dreams, Penguin. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1976

Fromm, Eric. The forgotten language (an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairytales and myths) Grove, Weidenfeld, New York, 1951.

Gamwell, Lynn. The muse is within. The psyche in the century of science-In Gamwell, L (Ed) Dreams 1900-2000. Science, Art and the unconscious mind. Cornell University press. Published in conjunction with the exhibition curated by Lynn Gamwell, 2000.

Hartmann, E. The Psychology and physiology of dreaming. A new synthesis. In Gamwell, L. Dreams 1900-2000. (op cit.)

Jaffe, Amelie. The process of individuation. In Man and his symbols. Aldus Books, London, 1964.

Jung, C. Man and his symbols. Aldus Books, London, 1964.

23 Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980

Lakoff, George, Turner. M. More than cool reason University of Chicago Press. Chicago 1989

Lakoff, George. “How metaphor structures dreams” The theory of conceptual metaphor applied to dreams” in Dreams. A reader on religious, cultural and psychological aspects of dreaming. Kelly Bulkely (Ed) Palgrave, New York, NY 2001

Mlodinow, L. Subliminal. How your unconscious mind rules your behaviour. Pantheon books, New York, 2012

Ronnberg, A and Martin, K. The book of symbols. Reflections on archetypal images. Taschen , Koln, 2010.

Tacey, D. Beyond literal belief: Religion as metaphor. Garrat, Australia, 2015

Von Franz, M L. The process of individuation in Man and his symbols ed. Carl Jung Aldus books, London 1964

24 Chapter two The house as metaphor

This project is an investigation into the self via the metaphor of the house. The basis of this idea is outlined in Gaston Bachelard’s influential text The Poetics of space (1969).

The house both encloses space (interior) and excludes space (everything outside) and thus has two main components, its interior and its façade. In this way the house reflects how one sees oneself, with an interior self as viewed from within and only revealed to intimates and an exterior self (the persona or mask) that is shown to others. The house metaphor also exhibits the duality of up and down (attic and cellar) whereby the higher and lower or conscious and subconscious self can be visualised.

The whole house can be contextualized as an act of portraiture with various features implying different aspects of the ‘self.’ Walls form a boundary. A roof shelters and protects. Doors and windows can be seen in relation to their functions of closing and opening.11 Wardrobes and drawers can be seen as repositories for thoughts, memories and things filed away, while chests, locks and keys speak of an aesthetic of hidden things, of discovery and of ignorance. Lamps illuminate, mirrors reflect; orchard and flower gardens speak of projects brought to fruition and fences convey separation and boundary.

2.1 The house image in dreams. The relationship between the homes we come from, the homes we make for ourselves and the houses we dream of, is curious, fascinating and revealing. From hovel to palace, ruin to mansion, the kind of house we see or enter in our dreams can be hypothesised as a reflection of how we see ourselves. Whether it is comfortable or oppressive, familiar or strange, crowded or empty, reminiscent of the past or full of new discovery, the house is certainly one of the most familiar of dream symbols.

Bogart (2009) examines the house dream as a symbolic statement about the dreamer’s psychological situation and emotional state. A rundown shack, for example, might

11 “A mere door can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to attempt to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.” (Bachelard, 1969 pp.224)

25 speak of loss, depression, or abandonment, while a cosy cottage could symbolise warmth and safety. Large spacious rooms or houses might indicate that there is room to grow, while small spaces represent cramped or confined conditions.

2.2 The ‘universality’ of the house metaphor

The Chinese philosophy of feng shui, where the house is seen to be a symbolic representation of the occupant’s life, attests to the universality of the house metaphor. The art of feng shui is a theoretical conceptual system, not only a fortune telling device and the bagua is an octagonal map that can be overlaid on to the ground plan of a house giving a reading of the health and wellbeing of the individual. As in acupuncture for the body, the feng shui of a house is based on the notion of the flow of chi or energy in one’s life, and the way the bagua is aligned depends on the placement of the front door, through which energy is visualised as entering the house. The centre represents the general health and wellbeing of the individual, while the surrounding areas represent what are seen as the other important areas of one’s life such as wealth, career/life path, children and creativity, relationships, elders/heritage. As in the I Ching, elemental forces such as water and fire have symbolic meanings, which are then combined and overlaid to deepen, extend and create new meanings. Houses will face different directions and be placed in different locations (be placed on hills or in valleys, be built in tightly or surrounded by open ground) while house plans will have certain areas of the bagua enhanced, some diminished and some absent. Some areas of the house will be through-zones while some are blocked; some areas light, some dark; some pleasantly arranged and furnished, some untidy and full of junk; some areas constantly used and

26 some shut up, thus implying metaphorical relationships to the occupant’s life. In addition, the house’s features are seen to have a symbolic resonance: windows and doors representing an inflow and outflow of energy; the kitchen the centre of industry and prosperity; the bathroom and plumbing representing emotional flow, expulsion, loss and so on.

The concept of feng shui differs from other house metaphors in the idea that by making physical changes in the house, one can effect changes on other levels within the self: the idea that changing a room’s function, tidying up, removing clutter and rubbish, adding objects that speed-up/slow down/reflect the energy; changing the entrance from one door to another and so on, can, theoretically, propel change in the occupant’s health, emotions and fortune. This relationship between the house and the self represents a balance between the inherited and malleable aspects of one’s life and psyche. It is a kind of two-way mirror where who we are, is not only reflected onto our surroundings, but our surroundings are also reflecting back to us, who we are.

In Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung (1983) tells his famous house dream where he explores a house of many levels, or floors, which he interprets as representing levels of consciousness. The descent downward into lesser-known realms of consciousness is represented by the ground floor, the cellar and vault beneath, and takes him down below the bedrock of the earth. “It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche, that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with unconscious additions.” (Jung, 1983, p184). Jung then describes a series of dreams of exploring adjoining houses, annexes or wings where he finds unknown rooms, that he didn’t know existed. “The unknown wing was a part of my personality, an aspect of myself; it represented something that belonged to me but of which I was not yet conscious.” (Jung, 1983, p 228.)12 Later on Jung was to design and build his own house, according to his metaphoric requirements thus manifesting in stone his own evolving and maturing psyche.

12 An ongoing dream of mine (that is to say, one that reoccurs from time to time, in different versions) is that I am going to/at a house that is variously where I live/or where I’m moving to/or have lived in before/ or am going to for the first time. It is a large white building by the water, on a cliff above /beside the ocean (although the water is known to be there rather than that I see it.) The house is made up of many apartments/ with different aspects and attributes. Apartments may face west or east or north; they may have a fabulous view, or face a wall; they may be spacious and architecturally grand; dark or light or whatever. Different dramas play out in different dreams but it is recognisably the same setting.

27 2.3 The unheimlich and the interior

Freud’s psychoanalytic interior conceptualises the idea of unheimlich (literally ‘unhomely’ although that is not the normal meaning of the word). Freud describes the effect of a double interior and talks about our reflection, double or shadow. Freud's (1985) interpretation of the term comes from the double meaning of "heimlich" which in normal German means "secret", or hidden. "Unheimlich" in standard speech means "uncanny" or "weird" but if the normal meaning of "heimlich" is taken, it could be seen as meaning "un-secret" or "revealed". Hence Freud's reading of the word "unheimlich" to mean not only "uncanny" but an uncanniness which results from a revealing of what had been private, concealed or not known to the self. A dream reality breaking into everyday reality is uncanny for Freud, because it is not only "un-homely", but also "un- secreted" like a private, repressed thought breaking into normal conscious life.

Unheimlich can also talk about an abode that affords no refuge: “The house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror…that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity”. (Engburg, 2009) An exhibition at ACCA in 2009, called ‘The dwelling’ explored the house metaphor, and particularly the notion of the unheimlich. “Through stories such as Hansel and Gretel and films like Psycho, the dwelling has been activated as a dynamic character in our consciousness and in popular culture” (Engburg, 2009) The combining of an apparent photographic reality with dreamlike symbolism creates a deeply affective response to David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s ‘House 2 Great artesian basin, Pennsylvania’

Haines and Hinterding House 2-The great artesian basin Pennsylvania From The dwelling exhibition ACCA, 2009 (Media release: The dwelling). (Image reproduced with kind permission of the artists.)

28

The Bates motel in Hitchcock’s Psycho becomes a dominant character in the film in a Freudian and an actual sense as a container of the “repressed maternal.” This house holds no comfort or refuge but is like “a predatory animal’s lair. Off the beaten track, menacing and dilapidated, its interior labyrinthine maze is waiting to ensnare the unwary traveller.” (Engburg, 2009). The potency of the famous shower scene results from the privacy, intimacy and relaxation we would normally associate with bathing being ruptured by the sudden intrusion of brutality.

The hotel in The Shining is similarly isolated; cut off completely from the outside world by both geography and weather. Its interior is vast, mirrored, deceptive and haunted/hallucinatory. Gradually the house manifests an evil intent, overwhelming the lives and psyches of the inhabitants.13

Bates hotel Psycho House interior - The Shining Universal studios, 1960 (fair use)* Warner Bros, 1980 (fair use)*

The overlap of the hidden and the revealed presents as a visible disjunct between what is safe and known and what is unsafe or unknown. In films such as Psycho and The Shining a disruption occurs in the otherwise seamless narrative of the ‘normal’ and the everyday, that creates a tear in the fabric of safe everyday existence to reveal ‘what lies beneath’.

13 The Shining is a 1980 British-American psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Dianne Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, and Scatmann Crothers. The film is based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, although the film and the novel differ in significant ways (from Wikipedia). * Fair use in this paper, of film posters or stills, is based on: 1.This is a scholarly paper with no commercial application, 2. This use of the images has no adverse effect on authorised commercial applications. 3. The still or poster is required as illustration of a discussion, which is favourable to the maker and copyright holder and 4. The images are a small fraction of the whole work.

29 While essentially denoting a kind of dread or creeping horror or an evocation of feelings that might arise in solitude and darkness, the unheimlich can also suggest an intellectual uncertainty about the nature of things. It can, by extension, speak of a momentary disjunct that causes an uncertainty about where or who we are; of not knowing what is real and what is imagined; what is coincidence and what is fate; what is benign and what is malign.

There are many situations in life that can provoke a sense of being outside oneself, a slippage between waking and dreaming or a situation that causes the production of the self-regarding capacity within the psyche. These situations are characterised by a disjunct; a jolt that causes one to observe one’s actions and possible motivations, rather than merely participating in life’s drama. This idea is similar in essence to when Proust speaks of the experience of tasting the tea and madeleine, which evokes a moment of déjà vu, causing a similar over-seeing of life: the sudden provoking of memory in an experiential sense, which is a slippage between past and present. This gap between image and space, allows senses to be sensed, and experience to be theorised. It is a crack that allows light to shine on that interior space.

This notion of a crack or break in the fabric of everyday existence, that reveals another viewpoint or understanding, that makes visible that which is hidden, is pivotal to understanding the works in this project.14 It is visualised in Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974)15, and the Leonard Cohen song Anthem.16

14 Essentially, these “potent moments” are the basis or starting point for many of my visual narratives and situations. They might be evoked in numerous ways such as an overlap between a potent dream narrative and external happenstance, or by seeing the face of a friend become a mask that slips to reveal, enmity or disloyalty, or by the sudden recognition of a repeating pattern in past and present experience, or by glimpsing an underlying metaphor or narrative in associated images or ideas. In addition, the works are consciously intended to create a similar sense of slippage in the viewer, by juxtaposing photograph and painted image for example, (leading the viewer to question what they are looking at) or situating the narrative on an ambiguous edge such as that between comfort and terror.

15 In 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark sawed through an actual house and then jacked it up at one end, causing it to split apart and allowing the light to penetrate the interior.

16 “There is a crack, a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in” from Anthem on the 1992 Leonard Cohen Album The future (Columbia)

30

The iconic metaphor of the split house in Gordon Matta-Clark’s work (studies by the author)

2.4 The house in film and literature

The house image is used as a psychological metaphor in many of Hitchcock’s films and represents an overlap between external and internal realities. The menace contained in Hitchcock’s settings seems to echo something within our own heads. Buildings and interiors feature not only as a setting and atmosphere but also as a character: a kind of symbolic entity in their own right.17 Hitchcock’s buildings and settings are always operating on a psychological level, echoing plots, subplots, identity confusion and other hidden aspects.

Rear Window Vertigo The Birds Dir. Alfred Hitchcock Dir. Alfred Hitchcock Dir. Alfred Hitchcock Paramount pictures 1954 Paramount Pictures, 1958 Universal Pictures, 1963 (fair use)

17 The window in Rear Window, for example, frames and structures our view of the world in a way that implies our perception is limited and one sided and thus raises questions of how we judge what is true and what is not. Other building-related psychological tropes include the tower in Vertigo and the phone box in The Birds

31

The house Tara in the film Gone with the wind is both a separate character with its own theme music and a personification of the emotions and fortunes of its occupants. The burning of Atlanta and of Twelve Oaks symbolises the death of the Old South while Tara’s survival symbolises Scarlett’s resilience and refusal to bow to adversity.

Tara from Gone with the Wind Atlanta burning in Gone with the Wind Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1939 (Fair use)

In many of Grimms’ fairytales, the house plays a metaphorical role. In some (e.g. Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin), the heroine makes a journey from humble shack to splendid shining palace. This elevation in fortune seems to be a metaphor for a personal journey of transformation. 18 The castle in Sleeping Beauty seems to symbolise conscious awareness. When the princess and the household fall under the bad fairy’s spell and lapse into unconsciousness, the weeds encroach, vines grow over the walls, the forest grows back, and the castle becomes hidden from view. The prince must hack his way through the undergrowth before he rediscovers the house, enters to discover its secret, and then re-awakens Beauty and the household to consciousness.

2.5 The house image in visual art

The image of the house is used often in visual art to explore the notion of the self or the psyche.

18 Although, according to Bachelard, (1963) the hut dweller wishes for a palace, while the dweller in the palace wishes for a hut. (Because there is no intimacy in the vastness of the palace.)

32 The houses of Edward Hopper seem to speak of psychological factors rather than of what is merely visible. Hopper’s houses are monumental, proud, isolated and empty. These houses are sitting in, but separated from, the natural world and seem to imply that the psyche of modern man is cut off and empty: he doesn’t see what is around him and the world cannot see him. The use of light and shadow on the architectural and natural landscape endows Hopper’s houses with surrealistic or dreamlike qualities.

Edward Hopper Edward Hopper Edward Hopper Rooms by the sea, 1951 Lighthouse, 1929 Rooms for tourists, 1945 Yale University Art gallery Metropolitan Museum of Art Yale University Art Gallery (library.artstor.org)

Hopper’s houses evoke a voyeuristic feeling: a hidden or underlying sense of the observer and the observed.

Do Ho Suh’s diaphanous houses talk of a fusion of interior and exterior self and of the overlapping of the dualities of containment and openness, interiority and exteriority, transparency and opacity. These houses are not just about physical space but also about a metaphorical space of history culture and memory. (Do Ho Suh, 2001)

Seoul home is an exact replica of the interior of his parents’ home in Seoul. It embodies nostalgia, memory and yearning for the past but also talks about a lack of privacy and personal space. Made of silk with traditional Korean sewing techniques, it is so light it can be packed up and carried around like the house of a snail. It is a response to the artist’s moving from Korea to the US and his feelings of disorientation and displacement. It is exquisitely made and an object of great beauty. By changing the house’s materials, Suh has created an image of self that is transparent, porous, permeable but also weightless and transcendent. It speaks of a self that is no longer anchored to the ground but rather is floating and unattached. In Stairway, created from orange silk and attached to the ceiling of the gallery, the transcendent aspect is emphasised. Like stairs to another realm, these stairs seem to create a transitioning

33 space between the conscious and the subconscious, the material and the heavenly, the lower and the higher self. Home within a home and Reflection extend the metaphor of the home and the self. Like props for a grand narrative, they emphasise displacement, fragmentation, discontinuity but also transparency, impermanence, transcendence. The house is portrayed as site of dream, desire, memory and longing.

Do Ho Suh Do Ho Suh Do Ho Suh The Perfect home-II, 2003 Staircase-III, 2003 Reflection, 2004

Translucent nylon Translucent nylon Nylon and stainless steel tube 279.4 x 609.6 x 1,310.6 cm Dimensions variable Dimensions variable

© Do Ho Suh, Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong

In her infinity room installations (e.g. “Infinity mirror room phalli’s field” and “Fireflies across the water”) Yayoi Kusama has created mirrored room environments that involve the viewer in the work by repeating, distorting, depersonalizing and somewhat disintegrating both the image of the room itself and also the image of the persons entering the space. These installations break the viewer into multiple pieces so that they are not seen as discrete persons but as personas or personifications: no longer individual personalities but almost stylised repeated patterns. This mirrored stage presents the individual as infinite, their image from every different viewpoint multiplied endlessly into infinity. The effect is somewhat destabilizing since normally when one enters a room there is a subconscious expectation of being somewhat sheltered and enfolded within the space, but in these rooms, walls and floors drop away into ‘forever’. The experience is oddly like being outside of one’s body and looking back at oneself: views of oneself from below and behind are almost never seen and the experience is profoundly disorienting. The experience of entering the enclosed dark space lit by a

34 million echoing points of light in the “Fireflies on the water”19 installation is nothing short of “cosmic”. One feels suspended in space like Neil Armstrong or David Bowie’s Major Tom, cut off from all that is familiar and known, floating alone in the infinity of the universe. The feeling of the self being obliterated and the reverberation from the invisible universe has echoes in Buddhism in the way that the reality of the individual ‘self’ is seen as being but a fragment or reflection of the whole, detached from the desires and attachments of the ego and earthly existence.

Yayoi Kusama Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room– Fireflies on the Water, 2002 The souls of millions of light years away, 2013 Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights and water Wood, metal, glass mirrors, 281.9 x 367 x 367 cm acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, 111 × 144 1/2 × 144 1/2 acrylic balls and water Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012 287.7 x 415.3 x 415.3 cm 113 1/4 x 163 1/2 x 163 1/2 in Edition of 3. First shown at David Zwirner Gallery in New York in 2013

Images reproduced with kind permission of the artist.

Mike Nelson’s unsettling installations reflect a postmodern sense of fear and nothingness in their distortion of time and space. His alarmingly recursive interior spaces are like the labyrinths of the mind, conveying an unsettling sense of the uncanny, a kind of a horror movie setting where something has just happened or is just about to happen.

The installation To the memory of HP Lovecraft (1999, 2008) presents as a place where it appears that a terrifying scene of destruction has occurred, where a wild animal or

19 Whitney Museum of Art 2002, MCA, Sydney, 2009

35 untamed energy has been let loose and torn the place to shreds. Dillon (in Psychobuildings, 2008) sees some political weight in this work. First shown in Edinburgh in 1999, it predates the expansion of global terror and the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and seems prescient of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, kidnappers’ cells and places outside of the light of reason. These works speak of the unseen interiors of history as much as the architecture of our own psyches.

Mike Nelson, To the memory of HP Lovecraft, 1999 Mike Nelson, The Coral Reef, 2000 © Mike Nelson. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Nelson describes The Coral Reef (2000) as a kind of a fiction that we enter like reading a book (the installation as scary novel), but because it exists in time and space is particularly unsettling. A claustrophobic construction of rooms and narrow corridors, viewers are left to find their own way from entrance to exit, becoming enmeshed in the realities they enter. Submerged below the orthodoxies of society (like a reef below the water) are the realities of the disempowered, the other. Nelson has created rooms of drug users, terrorists, bikers and we are invited to become lost in a world of lost people. This image of the psyche as isolated, disempowered, empty and possibly vengeful is very disturbing.

While the image of the house is popularly conflated with domesticity and comfort, contemporary artists have found it a potent vehicle for exploring the complexity of the human psyche and its changing relationship to the world it inhabits.

36 2.6 Withdrawing/venturing forth. Refuge and fortress

Michael Pollan, in describing the building of his own personal studio/retreat (A place of my own, 2008) talks of an ongoing tension that can be seen to exist in our lives and our dwellings between the wish to withdraw and the need to venture forth. Jay Appleton (1975) first talked about this dichotomy in reference to aesthetics and the landscape. The dual requirements of safety and opportunity, view and cosiness, particularly as they apply to architecture, are the basis of prospect-refuge theory.

There is also a conflict between the idea of the home as refuge (a place where we feel safe, private, nourished) and the idea of home as a fortress. (Somewhere we barricade ourselves into in an attempt to keep the world out). The idea of home as a refuge is challenged by the home that is experienced as prison. Home can also be experienced as a place of confinement, fear or violence. The image of the white, suburban, Cleveland house of Ariel Castro is a clear symbol of the extent of restraint and suffering that can exist within four walls, and hidden behind the façade of an apparently normal, down- home dwelling.20 For women in various domestic situations, the home may be experienced as a site of oppression or drudgery in contrast to men for whom it may be a site of power or status.21

2.7 Public and private dimensions of the house

Home has both public and private dimensions. What is visible (façade, living room) both expresses and conceals. The public areas of the house show the face or mask that the dweller presents to society, while what is “hidden” (cupboards, drawers, attic, cellar) suggests private or latent content. The attic and cellar are spaces apart, outside the boundaries of the ‘high status space’ or rooms that are used daily. The private spaces such as the attic or cellar reveal the authentic aspects of home, according to Bachelard, (1969) but as Korosec-Serfaty (1984) points out “Modern housing contains an ever smaller number of these secondary sub-territories” (Korosec Serfaty 1984, p 305) and there may be a profound psychological significance in their disappearance.

20 In 2013, a young woman escaped from the confinement of this house to reveal that she and two other girls had been abducted as young adolescents, raped and held prisoner, for over ten years, by Ariel Castro, (who later committed suicide while awaiting trial). Although the house is in a normal suburban street where the neighbouring houses are extremely close, nobody seemed to have any idea that anything was amiss. 21 See, for example, Judith Butler Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, 1990

37 Attics and cellars speak of hidden, secret and private spaces of ourselves: our secret thoughts and feelings. Hidden spaces and objects delineate private psychology from social self. The attic is the head, the cellar the roots of the house. Murders are committed in cellars. People are imprisoned in cellars. They are dark, hidden, scary, enclosed. “Instead of facing the cellar (the unconscious), Jung’s prudent man seeks alibis for his courage in the attic” (Bachelard, 1969, p 19).

Gregor Schneider’s ‘Basement Kellar Haus u r’ (1985) (which was reinstalled at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2012 as part of Kaldor art projects), creates a dark, frightening unknown cellar space. On opening the door, one is confronted by an unknown that seems to exude a palpable threat. The majority of visitors (when I attended) chose not to enter. The darkness, the “not knowing” what is there, the difficulty in negotiating the complex, dark interior and the feeling of claustrophobia engendered, were quite overpowering. The cellar represents the darkest, the most repressed, hidden or feared part of our psyches.

Gregor Schneider, Basement Kellar haus u r (kaldorartprojects, 2012)

Attic and cellar also imply the house’s sense of verticality: an up and down that Bachelard (1964) refers to as the house’s polarity (pp17- 23). The attic that is light and high and speaks of rational thought, hopes and ideals, while the basement that is dark and low down, speaks of the unconscious, the libidinal and the fearful. Thus we have a sense of a higher and lower self, or upper and deeper aspects of the psyche...with steps and stairs being our means of ascent and descent within.

While the concept of cellar and attic are crucial concepts in the construct of the house as metaphor, the cellar or underneath space is either absent or is an open space (in the Queenslander) in Australian houses. The attic is relatively rare. The majority of Australian houses consist of just one level. The relationship between the typical

38 Australian house and aspects of the Australian psyche and culture may be worth pondering. By way of contrast, many Indian homes feature a flat roof that is utilised as an outdoor living space.

Houses in Bundi, Rajasthan (Photos by the author)

2.8 The house and our material possessions

Our material possessions can also be viewed as extensions of personality, as symbols of aspects of self. A full cellar, pantry or cupboard can reflect plenty and security. We can also store junk and unused items and things to be temporarily forgotten in these spaces. Boxes of things can be hidden, sidelined, later rediscovered and like memory they can thus be simultaneously owned and disowned. Material objects can be tangible signs of one’s experience, one’s existence. Attics and other storage spaces can be a family’s memory box, a place to rummage in the past but also an assertion of an existence of that past and a heritage. Cleanouts and throwing things away can represent an erasing of the past.

The whole notion of keeping and throwing away reveals our relationship with objects and our security in our sense of self. It can be difficult to throw things away and also to leave memories behind. Our attachment to things exists in addition to, or separate from,

39 their monetary or functional value, although as Song Dong’s ‘Waste not, want not’ 22 shows, scarcity can be related to accumulation.

Song Dong Waste not, want not, Carriageworks, Sydney, 2013 (Photos by the author)

This massive installation of a lifetime of collection and accumulation is a meditation on our whole relationship with our possessions. The house is portrayed as a receptacle of all we possess. It brings up the whole notion of accumulation and dispersion: two primal forces described at length in the I Ching.23

Keeping things and surrounding ourselves with material possessions can be a way of protecting ourselves and adding weight to our existence. In our storage spaces, useless things are kept side by side with treasures. With the passing of time objects can deteriorate, lose value, become worthless or, alternatively, acquire value by becoming rarities, or antiques. As we sift through the material accumulations of our existence, we must attempt to gauge what has value and what is worthless.24

22 Waste Not, want not is an exhibit by Chinese artist Song Dong that displays over 10,000 domestic objects formerly owned by his late mother, who refused to throw anything away if she could possibly reuse it. First exhibited in Beijing in 2005, Waste Not has since travelled around the world to major galleries and was exhibited in Australia (at Carriage works) as part of the Sydney festival in 2013

23 One day I came upon a small pile of possessions dumped in the gutter outside a housing commission block of flats. There was an old battered suitcase containing photos of a young soldier, letters and cards, and lace handkerchiefs still in cellophane. An old lady had died and her treasured possessions were just tossed away. Anyone who has cleared the house of a deceased relative will understand the temporality and poignancy of possessions no longer possessed. 24 A few years ago, I had a series of dreams involving garage sales. The last and most memorable involved a Herculean task of sorting out enormous piles of things before the sale. I spent all night separating things into piles of what was actually mine and what wasn’t. Ultimately I had only a few things

40 The accumulation of too many things, the inability to throw things away or living in a state of disorder can be seen as symptomatic of a deeper malaise. On the other hand, clean private spaces, minimal interiors and order and organisation of possessions assert a kind of moral virtue, intimating that there is nothing to hide. For most of us however, our homes contain cupboards, attics, garages and spare rooms that are messy and disordered spaces, and thus speak of neglect and forgetting.

2.9 The house metaphor expresses itself in dualities

The global house metaphor throws up many interesting sub-metaphors that can talk about relationships, unresolved dualities, and complex actions involving the self.

Inside/outside talks about the duality between the exterior and interior self: between what is revealed and what is hidden; what is shared and what is private; and between the façade and the ‘authentic self’. This construct covers ideas around persona and identity; social self vs. private self; and also notions around the conscious and unconscious self. The inside/outside construct might be used to examine questions such as how we access the interior self; how we integrate persona and private identity; as well as how we might discern our unconscious or underlying patterns and find ways of processing our experience.

The house metaphor also implies the duality of up and down denoted by cellar and attic, roof and floor and stairs up and down between floors. Here we can visualize the higher and lower self; our aspirations and desires; the conscious and unconscious mind; the theoretical and the foundational; the making of positive upward moves and negative downward moves, as well as speak about moods and emotions that are elevated, or depressed

The dual notion of ‘heimlich’/ ‘unheimlich’ draws attention to the house’s ill defined edge between secret and revealed, safe and dangerous, familiar and unfamiliar, the normal and everyday versus “the other”. It can be used to explore notions around surface and hidden realities, about our sense of self and our place in the scheme of things.

in my pile, while the pile of other people’s stuff reached nearly to the sky. When I awoke, the symbolism seemed very clear and after that I had no more garage sale dreams.

41 Furniture and possessions offer another whole layer to the house metaphor, relating to complex notions around ownership, security, identity and memory.

The site of interface between interior and exterior self is marked by walls, fences and boundaries, while places of exit and entrance such as doors and windows speak of coming and going, joining and separating, hiding and revealing, opening and closing. Doorways and hallways talk about a site of movement between interior and exterior, implying departures, homecomings and transitions and will be explored further in chapter six.

The house is a common dream image that can be seen to represent emotional and psychological aspects of the psyche. The house or home that implies a metaphorical relationship to the self is also a familiar motif in film, art and literature. This metaphor is used to background the four bodies of work that comprise this investigative project: Bringing it all back home, In my mother’s house, In my daughter’s house and No direction home.

42 References

Bachelard, Gaston.Tr Maria Jolas. The poetics of space. Beacon press, Boston, 1969

Bogart, Greg. Dreamwork and self-healing. Unfolding the symbols of the unconscious. Karnak books, London, 2009

Cooper, C. The house as a symbol of self in Proshansky, M, Ittelson W, Rivlin, L Environmental psychology People and their settings Holt Rhinehart, Winston, New York, 1976

Cooper Marcus, Clare. House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home. Conari Press, Berkeley California ,1995

Do-Ho Suh: Space is a Metaphor for History. Interview with Priya Malhotra http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/do-ho-suh/press/76. 2001

Engburg, Juliana. The dwelling. Catalogue essay for exhibition The Dwelling at Australian centre for contemporary art, Southbank, Victoria. 9/10-27/11, 2009.

Freud, Sigmund. The uncanny Chapter 1. Art and literature. Jensen’s gravida, Leonardo da Vinci and other works. Penguin, Harmondswoth, 1985.

Jacobsen, Kirsten. A developed nature: a phenomenological account of the experience of home. Cont Philosophy rev (2009) 42 pp. 355-373

Jung, Carl. Memories, dreams, reflections. (first published 1963, Collins and Routledge and Kegan Paul) Fontana paperbacks, London 1983

Korosec-Serfaty, Perla. The home from attic to cellar. Journal of environmental psychology (1984) 4, 303-32

Lakoff, George. “How metaphor structures dreams” The theory of conceptual metaphor applied to dreams” in Dreams. A reader on religious, cultural and psychological aspects of dreaming. Kelly Bulkely (Ed) Palgrave, New York, NY 2001

Mallet, Shelley. Understanding home: a critical review of the literature, The Sociological review. (February 2004) Volume 52, Issue 1. pp 62-69

Pollan, Michael. A place of my own. The architecture of daydreaming. Penguin books, 2008

43 PsychoBuildings: Artists take on architecture, Catalogue of Exhibition at the Hayward UK. 28 May-25 August 2008 Curated by Ralph Rugoff. Published by Hayward publishing, Southbank centre London, 2008

Renner, Rolf. Hopper. Taschen, Koln, 2007

Walsh, John. Rachel Whiteread: I’ve done the same thing over and over. Article in Independent newspaper 22/5/2012

Rice, Charles. The emergence of the interior: Architecture, modernity, domesticity. Rutledge, London, New York 2007

44 Chapter 3

Reality is a montage: Constructing meaning using composited images

Chapter 1 discussed the way that representational images can operate poetically via symbol and metaphor. Dreams, myths and fairy-tales all use this imagery to create stories or narratives that can be read in various ways, illuminating complex concepts as well as emotional and moral dilemmas. This chapter will explore the way the artworks in this project use this symbolic visual language to similarly compose metaphoric narratives by combining numerous images in a process I call alluvial narrative.

My alluvial narrative uses a layering and juxtaposing of images, a process perhaps more commonly found in poetry, where one image combines with and plays against another in various ways in order to form new associations and metaphors. New narratives can be formed from the combinations of multiple images within the one piece. Painted images are mixed with photo-transfer, stencil and text forming a layering of realities and interpretations.

Not only does the composite image painting allow for exploration of complex narratives, it could also be said to more closely represent the way we experience reality than does the single image painting. We rarely focus on just one thing, but rather, at any point in time, we are likely to experience, perceive, feel, think and remember, somewhat concurrently. Seeing the associations between such realities as past and present, thought and action, and feelings and perceptions is the basis of processing experience and creating understanding. The French philosopher and curator Nicolas Bourriaud says, in Post production. Culture as screenplay (2002), that “What we call reality is a montage” (p72).

Historically, paintings that combine multiple images, scenes or viewpoints have been used to convey the overlap between the spiritual and the mundane; between internal and external realities and between things happening here and things happening there (in either space or time.) Examples of this approach are common in the Medieval, Byzantine, and Baroque periods and can also be found in Chinese scroll paintings,

45 Egyptian friezes and Indian miniatures. In the 20th C the composite mode of picture making re emerged with the Surrealists and was revolutionised by the work of the Dada photomontagists. Film posters of the 1950s and 60s and the songs of Bob Dylan, were early formative influences on the development of my way of working. There is also an affinity between my work and that of painters such as Marc Chagall and Neo Rauch who similarly use composite imagery to express multi-levels of meaning.

The multi image way of working, while not “realistic” in a photographic or perceptual sense, is nevertheless intended to add realism in a psychological or experiential sense. The combining of various aspects (such as the religious/symbolic with the mundane) can deepen our understanding of a story or idea. Indeed it could be argued, such works more closely reflect the way reality is experienced than does a single scene or viewpoint. Not only do they acknowledge and reflect multiple layers or views, they also, potentially, allow the portrayal of more complex ideas.

3.1 The alluvial narrative, reality as a montage

A work of art can be seen as a way of constructing meaning by providing a form of synthesis, a means of ‘processing’ existence and of producing “different storylines and alternative narratives.” As Bourriaud (2002) says:

Just as through psychoanalysis, our unconscious tries, as best it can, to escape the presumed fatality of the familiar narrative, art brings collective scenarios to consciousness, and offers us other pathways through reality.... (p46)

By montaging and detourning different images together, such as the observed, the remembered and the imagined; the personal and the collective; the literal and the symbolic; there is the possibility of finding new connections, and of transcending the familiar, the conscious and the known narratives. New threads and directions can be followed and new narratives found through a process of observing, associating, and recombining. The paintings in this project are a conscious seeking of the relationships, the associations: the subtext if you will, of one’s existence. Perhaps the life lived may itself be seen as a dream, (as Sufi philosophers and the film The Matrix hypothesized). Maybe its threads can be similarly untangled, its themes and meaning read.

The choice of images in my paintings is more intuitive than logical but it is not at all arbitrary. It imagines an interconnectedness between all things: between events in the

46 day and dreams at night; between things that cause us pain now and memories of past hurts; between questions we are asking and books and conversations that serendipitously fall across our path; between images we see and images we imagine; between individual experience and collective experience; between things that we are doing and things that are being done to us; and between narratives in our personal life and archetypal narratives in myths and stories. Connections we mostly miss; connections we may never have imagined.

In the process, additional cross connections may occur. These connections operate rather more rhizomatically than hierarchically. They are both associative and metaphoric, both lateral and directional, and operate at conscious, super conscious, subconscious and unconscious levels of thought (as well as all points in between).

3.2 Dominant narratives questioned by the intersection of viewpoints and levels

As Bourriaud’s (2002) notion of “reality as a montage” highlights, experienced reality is the intersection of many viewpoints and levels. These viewpoint or levels may include sight, sound, feeling, memory, previous experience, subconscious associations, cultural associations, literature we have read, pop songs we have heard, beliefs we hold and so on. By synthesising composite images, we can bring together layers of reality that are normally kept separate, such as: conscious and subconscious; presence and memory; literal and symbolic; rational and emotional.

This process of synthesising various layers and levels of understanding can provide a glimpse of alternatives to dominant linear narratives. By putting disparate elements together, it is possible to come to new understandings and meanings that are outside the dominant paradigm. On the other hand, keeping the various layers separate and apart, the individual or the society can maintain control; the rational viewpoint can maintain its supremacy and existent power structures and political elites can continue. Dominant paradigms exist within individual groups, families, cultures and human society at large and cover notions of what is normal; what is acceptable in thought and deed; what is good, bad, right and wrong. These narratives and are often integrated, undetected and unquestioned within the individual psyche. Social structures and power hierarchies are embedded, as Foucault (1980) has pointed out. The notion of “compartmentalising” or keeping various aspects of our lives separate can serve to help preserve existing

47 structures, since it allows for dissonant thoughts and concepts to coexist within their separate compartments and without their coming up for examination.

3.3 Retextualising existing images

In choosing and putting together images, it may not always be necessary to create the images from scratch. In Postproduction, Culture as screenplay, Bourriaud (2002) makes the point that artistic originality may be as much in the processing as in the creation of images. It is the forms we choose, and the way we arrange them that are important. In discussing the ‘retextualisation’ of existing images in contemporary art practice, he says that “the artistic question is no longer what can we make that is new? ’, but “how can we make do with what we have?’ In other words: ‘how can we produce singularity from this chequered mass of objects names and references that constitute our daily life?” (P17) In explaining the way culture can be recycled to produce new work, Bourriaud (2002) references dee-jaying (where samples of different music are recombined) and the flea market (where unwanted possessions are sold to become someone else’s treasure).

In the age of Google image search, Instagram, 24- hour digital news, and the ubiquitous phone camera, it could be said that appropriations, references and quotation are not so much copyright and sacrosanct as part of the collective consciousness. Artists now have the entire canon of human culture at their disposal.

My artistic practice not only utilises personally observed and imagined images, but also collects, appropriates and manipulates images from other sources. Found or appropriated images are often inserted into a new context, e.g. the image of Walter Benjamin and his brother, and the beds from Buchenwald in Homeland, the image of Bob Dylan in Just looking, or the image of Romulus and Remus on the cushion in No direction home. Recognisable images, borrowed from the culture, can function to expand meaning. (As was discussed in Chapter 1.)

3.4 The composite image painting

The challenge inherent in compositing multiple images is how to work with multiple layers and levels on a two-dimensional painting surface. The images need to form a coherent or readable composition and the viewer needs to understand (be made aware of) what he/she is looking at (and how it might be read). In developing my process of alluvial narrative, I have considered the ways that other artists have worked with composited imagery.

48 Perhaps most influential, in the early development of my personal aesthetic, are film posters of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. While essentially a combining of “scenes” to tell a story, the movie posters combined portraits, settings and events with passion, emotion and text to create an exciting and enticing visual narrative that alluded to deeper human dramas: love; betrayal; war; destruction; redemption. As a child I would study these posters for hours forming my own narrative.25

Commonly these posters would have one dominant image and a number of sub images, which were smaller in size or lighter in tone, the whole thing drawn together by the overlaid text. The images were commonly mini-scenes, often from the artist’s imagination and not necessarily drawn from actual scenes in the film. Some of my favourite images are the Italian posters for Hollywood films by Anselmo Ballester.

Many of the works in this project reference the movie poster format to some degree, with a dominant image and text accompanied by secondary images. The various images, as in the film poster, are each a kind of scenario or mise en scene. In some of the later works, the movie poster influence becomes more of a sideshow alley banner. The movie poster (side show alley banner) functions as a metaphor for life as a film/show/ performance: a narrative that we might both act in, as well as view as a spectator.

An important distinction needs to be made between my ‘alluvial narrative’ and other popular contemporary uses of composite imaging, such as advertising or marketing posters. My alluvial narrative implies a non-fixed, accreted meaning. The images in these paintings are not serving a message, nor are they illustrating a known narrative. There is not a preconceived theme. Rather, it is the images themselves that, by association, form the threads that might be read.

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.” Michel Foucault

(Truth, power, self, an interview with Michel Foucault (25th October 1982)

25 My father owned a number of suburban picture theatres when I was young and I sometimes accompanied him to the theatre, but without actually seeing the film.

49

Gone with the Wind African Queen Heaven Can Wait (Ballester) Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1939 United artists, 1951 (mattmucahey.wordpress. (fair use) (fair use) com/anselmoballester)

3.5 The montaging of visual images in the songs of Bob Dylan

Another important influence on my approach is the work of Bob Dylan (not even a visual artist but a singer, songwriter, performer and all round chronicler) whose work has, through a peculiarly alchemical mix of visual image, metaphor, idea, cultural reference, fusing of the personal and the universal, melody and delivery managed to provide the kind of emotional response, understanding and transcendence that I seek to create in my painting. A number of works in this project (Bringing it all back home; Johnny’s in the basement, No direction home) have titles drawn from lines of Bob Dylan: so pervasive is his voice on my inner soundtrack.

Nobody twists words and pictures into such a new cloth as Dylan.

My existence led by confusion boats, Mutiny from stern to bow Ah but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now

‘My back pages’, Another side of Bob Dylan, 1964

50 I’ve been in gaol, Where all the mail showed That a man can’t give his address out to bad company Now I stand here looking at your yellow railroad In the ruins of your balcony Wondering where you are tonight Sweet Marie.

‘Absolutely sweet Marie’, Blonde on blonde. Columbia, 1966

‘He hears the ticking of the clocks And walks along with a parrot that talks, Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in Maybe she’ll pick him out again, how long must he wait, Once more for a simple twist of fate.

‘Simple twist of fate’, Blood on the tracks. Columbia, 1975

It is impossible using isolated excerpts of text to give the real flavour of the songs of Bob Dylan, where a montage of metaphors and visual images overlays an apparently fractured narrative, powerful music and a performative delivery. These different elements combine to create an emotional response and a kind of ‘hit-you-from behind’ mental response that can be experienced as a profound sense of intuitive understanding. As in a dream, a number of intensely visual but somewhat disparate images are laid down before a connecting point is apparent.

Academics such as Christopher Ricks (Warren professor humanities, Boston U) have pointed out that it is the overlaying of image, symbol, text, music and performance that result in the particular or peculiar response to Dylan’s songs.26

26 Indeed, Dylan himself describes in “Chronicles, volume 1” (2004) how, on attending a performance of Berthold Brecht songs at the Theatre de Lys, Christopher St, in New York, in 1963, he recognized and noted that the songs (in particular a song called Pirate Jenny) affected him in a particular and powerful way and how he wanted to emulate that. He goes on to describe a combination of evocative scenery, dramatic performance, deeply emotional undercurrent, symbolic forms, compelling but displaced

51 Craig McGregor (2007) draws attention to the way Dylan uses imagery drawn from such diverse sources as the Bible, the Beat poets, and Baudelaire, as well as borrowing lines and melody riffs from other songs, drawing them together in true montage fashion. Indeed, not only does his music combine folk, blues and rock and roll, he uses the whole canon of contemporary culture as a cut and paste job. Dylan references everything and he appropriates where necessary.

3.6 Art works based on the combining of images/ personal explorations into the composited image and pictorial space.

The single viewpoint or single subject painting, with which we are so familiar, is actually a relatively recent development and largely a device of Western painting.

In Chinese landscape painting, for example, various views combine in the one piece, moving up or across the work often joined by mist, water or clouds. In these works there is a combination of both here and there, now and then, concurrently in the one time and place.

Inherit uses a vertical format based on the underlying idea and metaphor of a carpet. Patterning, stencil and painterly effects serve to join the images and move the eye across the piece in a manner similar to the use of mist and water in a Chinese landscape.

narrative and music, that left the audience stunned – ‘sitting back and clutching their collective solar plexus’

“I found myself taking the song apart, trying to find out what made it tick, why it was so effective. I could see that everything in it was apparent and visible, but you didn’t notice it too much. Everything was fastened to the wall with a heavy bracket, but you couldn’t see what the sum total of all the parts were, not until you stood back and waited til the end.”

“I’d become rightly impressed by the physical and ideological possibilities within the lyric and the melody. I could see that the type of songs I was leaning toward playing didn’t exist and I began playing with the form, trying to grasp it-trying to make a song that transcended the information in it, the character and the plot.” (Dylan, Chronicles, 2004)

52

Wang Meng (1308-1385) Fan Kuan (990-1030) Catherine Kennedy The simple retreat Travellers among mountains Inherit, 2012 Hanging scroll; ink and and streams. Acrylic, gold leaf, image transfer colour on paper. Ink on silk hanging scroll and stencil on unstretched canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art. National Palace Museum, Taipei (library.artstor.org) (library.artstor.org)

Throughout the medieval period, (e.g. Herbert and Jan van Eyck’s The Ghent Altarpiece, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights) the putting together of multiple views or images relating to the one narrative was a popular way of presenting ideas and narratives visually. People were mainly illiterate and relied on images to tell the story. It was a way also of combining the mundane and the spiritual, the outer and the inner, the external world and the world of ideas and imagination.

53

Hieronymous Bosch. Garden of earthly delights.1504 Oil on wood, 220x389 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo Erich Lessing. (library.artstor.org)

During the Renaissance, with the mathematical solution to the portrayal of distance or three dimensionality on the two dimensional surface via one-point perspective, the single viewpoint, single subject painting somehow comes to be seen as more realistic. Also in this period, painting comes down from the walls and onto smaller panels, as patronage shifts to the secular sphere. Portraits and single subjects such as the nativity become more humanistic and individualized in a more humanistic world. (Much might also be theorized about the relationship of single viewpoint visual art, monotheistic religion and Western thought and ideas generally.)

But in church ceilings, multi-imaged work reached great heights. From Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to Tiepolo’s Wurzburg ceilings, grand, multi-scene works continue to describe, with great wonder, a cosmic whole, rather than just an aspect of the human drama. These works generally capitalised on the depth and space created by their existence within a three dimensional architectural space.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Michelangelo Allegory of the Planets and Sistine Chapel ceiling 1508-1512 Continents, 1752 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman

54

Multifaceted religious and secular dramas are also quite common in the Baroque period, particularly in the paintings of El Greco. The Burial of Count Orgaz combines the scene of the death and burial on earth, with scenes of the Count being received into heaven, with various other views and aspects of the drama, presented as if within the folds of heaven’s drapery.

El Greco. Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586-88 El Greco The adoration of the shepherds Santo Tomé de Toledo. Metropolitan Museum of Art (library.artstor.org) (library.artstor.org)

These works all seek to show related aspects of the drama within the one picture plane (a certain collapsing of time and space) in order to extend the narrative towards a deeper or more meaningful interpretation. Most importantly, these works combine the temporal and the spiritual, the inner and the outer worlds within an altered and fantastic but readable, landscape format.

Monumental narratives of an allegorical nature were popular in the 19th C. These works are however largely out of fashion, due to their out-dated portrayal of grand narratives of progress, morality, religion, and empire. The American painter Thomas Cole, for example, utilised this format in his grand narrative polyptych, “The course of Empire” (1836-8))

55

Thomas Cole. The Course of Empire, 1836-8 (The savage state, Consummation, Desolation). New York State Historical Society. (library.artstor.org)

Vestiges of this method of telescoping a number of viewpoints/parts of the story, up the picture plane as if it were a single viewpoint, appear periodically but increasingly, painting becomes an image from a particular viewpoint and ultimately defined by the one frame of the camera. Not only do conventions of painting change, but with them, ways of seeing and perceiving.

Perhaps the greatest change in the multi-image way of working occurred with the invention of Photomontage just after WW1 by Berlin Dadaists. Photomontage uses the photo as a ready-made image, pasting it together with text and drawing to form a new image that incorporates a fragmenting of known visual reality. Paradoxically, it was photography, valued for its realistic qualities, that was the means by which images could be transformed to create new realities.

Hannah Hoch Hannah Hoch Hannah Hoch Cut with a kitchen knife (1919-20) The beautiful girl 1919-20 Mutter (1925-6) Photomontage Photomontage Photomontage and watercolour library.artstor.org library.artstor.org Reunion des Musees Nationaux

56

Photomontage revolutionised the way artists used the two-dimensional picture plane and the way that ‘reality’ could be portrayed. Art, design and film have all incorporated montage in a seeking to extend the real to something not yet seen. This expanded view was able to collapse many views into one and replaces the single viewpoint with an image composed of a set of reassembled images. Relationships between physical objects are transformed; scale is upset and unrealistic spatial effects are suggested. The compositional device of dramatic foregrounding provokes a rethinking of relationships between objects and re-establishes a hierarchy of correspondences, thus making possible a radical realignment of power. Photomontage therefore became an ideal technique for political propaganda and advertising.

John Heartfield subverted the techniques of political propaganda to show up the class structure of social relationships and the menace of Fascism.

John Heartfield John Heartfield

30 June 1934. Heil Hitler Adolf the superman, (1934) Manuscript photo swallows gold and spouts junk, AIZ magazine 1932

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (library.artstor.org) (library.artstor.org)

Photomontage represented a radically new way of portraying and perceiving ‘reality’. It also allowed for the construction of a message, a political rhetoric: both political propaganda and political satire. It is however this construction of a message, particularly as it has been developed in advertising, which can adversely affect the reading of

57 contemporary montage since audiences may expect montage to illustrate a preconceived concept or idea.

Marc Chagall’s radiant works use intersecting planes to combine landscape views, with scenes and images from stories, myths, religion and memory. The way his works fuse observed realities with emotional, thought and metaphorical realities has been an inspiration to me from an early age. Playing with scale and perspective, his works incorporate a number of different viewpoints, timeframes, and layers of understanding. The images clearly read as separate realities yet the many views and images exist on the one picture plane as a coherent whole. Recurring symbols such as the goat, the rooster, the sun, the clock, the house, the tower, the river or the bouquet of flowers create not only an imaginative personal but also a ‘universal’ metaphorical language that expands the meaning beyond the frame. Inner and outer worlds are combined as past, present, memory, desire and imagination come together in a new narrative.

Marc Chagall Marc Chagall Marc Chagall I and the village, 1911 Paris through the window, 1939 Sun of Paris (1975) Oil on canvas Guggenheim Museum Oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art Private collection library.artstor.com library.artstor.com

The Surrealists explored combining multiple images in the one painting as they investigated underlying realities rather than the outer surfaces of things. Some, such as Paul Klee, used automatic drawing (a kind of unfocused doodling) to access the subconscious mind. The writer William Burroughs similarly used his cut-up technique to find new associations. The cut-up technique involved cutting up a piece of text and

58 then randomly putting the pieces back together to create a new text. (“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”.)27

I first tried cutting up and rearranging images after I lost a load of paintings from the roof racks of my car on the M4 motorway. These paintings were chopped and damaged by the fast moving cars that were following. The first experiment was more an attempt to retrieve something from what was lost rather than a technique with a successful outcome but I have subsequently experimented with cutting up and rearranging paintings and images in such works as Temple. In Temple, a number of smaller separate studies were cut up and consciously reassembled to make a new composite piece evoking a sense of the overall wonder of the forest via the compositing of overall views (trees and waterfalls) with numerous intensely viewed and detailed close up images (moss and fern). The squares of the separate frames or images are retained and the outline of the temple used as a compositional and symbolic joining device.

Catherine Kennedy Temple, 2013 (in process) Acrylic, photo-transfer, gold leaf, stencil on canvas

In their aim of representing the duality of dreaming/waking and conscious/subconscious reality in their paintings, many Surrealist painters extended the forced perspective landscape format (e.g. Dali’s “The persistence of memory”; De Chirico’s “The disquieting muses”). However, some artists such as Rene Magritte

27 William Burroughs Breakthrough in grey room: sound recording of speeches and cutups.

59 experimented with new ways to incorporate various views/realities within the one picture plane.

Rene Magritte Rene Magritte Rene Magritte la Clef des songes The attack, 1932 The false mirror, 1928 1930 oil on canvas oil on canvas Private collection, Vienna Groenerger museum, Museum of Modern Art (library.artstor.org) (library.artstor.org) (library.artstor.org)

Magritte developed a layered pictorial reality, often using a metaphorical window to glimpse another reality or layer beyond. His portrayal of the disjunct between waking and dreaming became very popular in the 60s and 70s. His paintings seem designed to jolt the viewer into an awareness of the layers or levels of ‘reality’.

Jean-Michel Basquiat combined figurative images and text with abstract drawing and painting techniques in his direct and intuitive works. Starting as a graffiti artist, Basquiat’s works are expressive and direct and retain the sense of a flat 2 dimensional wall space. Combining external images with a stream of consciousness scribbling, drawings, and text, Basquiat’s works are pictorial mind maps, making visible co existing images, thoughts, mental associations and experiences.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Diagram of the Ankle. The Ankle, 1982 Yale University Art Gallery, Charles B. Benenson Collection (library.artstor.org)

60 The work of the contemporary German painter Neo Rauch combines apparently disparate scenes, people and objects into majestic, dreamlike, human dramas. Rauch uses a realistic, classical painting technique but combines his images in unexpected and paradoxical ways, giving rise to rich psychological and political narratives. His works are part of a contemporary re-emergence of figurative painting in their use of representational imagery in a more metaphorical or allegorical fashion.

One of Rauch’s devices is to use architectural forms to combine coexistent exterior and interior views. This combination of exterior/interior imagery evokes a powerful interplay between surface and hidden realities so that the viewer seems to become a witness to both overt actions and covert motivations.

Neo Rauch. Heimkehr. 2008. Oil on canvas

Neo Rauch Der Nächste Zug, 2007. Oil on canvas

61

Neo Rauch Krypta (2005). Oil on canvas

All works ©Neo Rauch Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin and David Zwirner, New York/London VG Bildkunst, Bonn. Photos: Uwe Walter

By combining a number of representational images (or mise en scene) within the one work Rauch is able to create complex narratives that fuse the personal and the political, the observed and the dreamlike, the affective and the objective experience.

Much of my studio research has focussed on exploring ways that multiple images/ views might be incorporated successfully into the one picture plane. From Bosch to Dali, the most popular method has been to distort a readable landscape format into a kind of panorama by using forced perspective, a somewhat bird’s eye view or a sense of a wide-angle lens, producing an all-encompassing vista and allowing more apparent visible space to play with. Photomontage however radically altered the way artists organised objects in space, by dispensing with any necessity to refer to realities of visible three-dimensional space.

In many of my paintings I have allowed the various images to float on a neutral or monochromatic background, joining them through an association of ideas and text rather than attempting to draw the images together into one overall scene. The images exist a bit as separate frames, like in a comic or a film, which can however be read as parts of the same narrative. In paintings such as ‘Just looking’, and ‘Homeland’ the images, though separate, have been fused together by the use of paint, colour and texture.

62

Catherine Kennedy Homeland (detail), 2015 Catherine Kennedy Just looking (detail), 2014

I have experimented with actual layers, where paintings are overlaid with transparent layers of silk onto which additional images are painted or projected.

Daughter’s house (Scheffer gallery 2012) Pearls (Tap gallery 2013)

63 In addition, I have experimented with combining painting with sculpture and installation in an attempt to express overlapping or layered views and interpretations.

No direction home (detail) 2015 Just looking install (detail) 2014 Found object (doll house), LED lighting, Found objects (chair, boots, feathers) Acrylic paint, photo-transfer, acrylic hair. Acrylic paint, photo-transfer, on canvas.

Finding new ways to combine images, layers and viewpoints, in order to find new narratives and deal with complex ideas, is a subject of ongoing research.

64 References

Ades, D. Photomontage. London, Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du réel, 1998.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Tr Jeanine Hermann. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. Tr Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punishment: the birth of the prison. Penguin books, Harmondsworth, 1979

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and writings 1972-1977. Ed Colin Gordon. Harlow, England.c1980

Lakoff, George. How Metaphor structures dreams: the theory of conceptual metaphor applied to dream analysis, in Kelly Bulkely (ed) Dreams, a reader on religious, cultural and psychological dimensions of dreaming. Palgrave, NY 2001

McGregor, Craig. (Like a rolling stone-Bob Dylan at 70-Into the music 2007, ABC Radio National.

Gray, Michael. Song and dance man 3. The art of Bob Dylan. Cassel Academic. UK, 1999

65 Chapter 4

The structure of the self: ‘Homeworld’ and the ‘In my mother’s house’ project

Within the idea of the house as a metaphor for the self, actions that involve the house such as cleaning, tidying, redecorating and renovating all imply aspects of remaking the self, while building a house, knocking one down and rebuilding can bring up considerations around the underlying structure, or core of self.

This chapter explores the structure of the house of self and considers Homeworld, the Sydney home display village, as a metaphor for the construction of self and identity in contemporary society. Ideas around the acquired self vs. the consciously constructed self are explored in relation to notions of templates, floor plans, facades, interiors and package deals.

The floor plan sets the basic parameters of the house, such as its size, the number of rooms it will have, the way those rooms relate to each other, the placement of windows and doors and so on. Plans, in turn, are usually drawn up with regard to templates modelled on previous designs. Templates may be from traditional or modern sources; they might be open plan or intricate and cosy and they will likely, to a greater or lesser degree reflect the culture within which they exist.

The facade creates the way the house is viewed by others. It may be grand or humble, traditional or modern, decorated or plain, immaculately kept or shabby and neglected. It may be similar to surrounding houses or idiosyncratic and different. The furnishing of the interior is likely to be more flexible and personal but it will probably relate, nevertheless, to stylistic and cultural influences. The interior may be a very private space, or it may be set up with careful regard to its presentation and the way it will be shared with others.

The way patterns and prototypes created by culture, society, heredity, law, upbringing and education will influence the formation of individual identity raises questions relating to freewill and the individual’s actual ability to make real choices.

66 Possibilities around the renovation, rebuilding or remaking of the house of self are considered in relation to psychoanalysis and recent research into neuroplasticity.

4.1 Homeworld

Homeworld is a Sydney display village of home and design packages. At the Homeworld village in Kellyville there are 220 different homes, displaying designs by forty-six different builders. The first encounter with Homeworld is overwhelming due to the large numbers of builders, houses and apparently unending choices available. Negotiating the complexity seems impossible however it soon becomes clear that there is a defined process.

Homeworld, Kellyville (author’s photo) The Sirocco floor plan (Masterton Homes brochure)

“What you’re buying is a floor plan.” (front of house girl with Masterton Homes, Homeworld) The various named houses (the Tiffany, the Inspiration, the Solara, the Grove, and so on ad infinitum), are in fact names for different templates or floor plans. Once you have chosen the template or plan, (in single or double storey, in 3 or 4 bedrooms (nothing smaller), you then make a choice from a set number of single or double storey facades (the Classic, the Jazz, the Modern Federation, the Regal, the Trend, the Vogue the Contemporary and so on). While you may, from the outside, appear to be looking at ten different houses, behind the different facades may be the

67 same floor plan. The converse may also be true: behind the same façades may be different floor plans. Typically, a builder will present 20-50 different floor plans each with an accompanying choice between approximately ten different facades. (Typically there will be approximately 10 single storey facades and 10 double storey facades.) The floor plans of course, depending on their size and complexity, range in price as do the facades (which would undoubtedly concentrate the choice) but the building material, the type of construction, the ceiling height and so on are all predefined by the builder.28

What is most noticeable on visiting a Homeworld village is the kind of ‘Lego’ nature of the facades: a square, a rectangle, a circle, a triangle seem to be infinitely and not very aesthetically arranged and rearranged. There might be a pointed roof, a sloping roof, a flat roof; square windows, rectangular windows or arched windows; little finials, round portholes or huge block like columns; but each house essentially looks like a variation of the next.

The next decision, after the floor plan and façade, is colour scheme and there is an in- house colour consultant who will help to expedite the colour choices for walls, trims, tiles, roof and so on. Choices also have to be made of exterior finishes: plain brick or rendered; different types of brick; different coloured render. Each builder will usually however only offer one range of tiles, one colour chart etc. The client will then choose floor coverings and finishes from the builder’s selection.

Illustrations from Homeworld brochures (Masterton Homes)

28 Masquerading as a customer in order to do my research, I was bemused to be told that the Knock down /rebuild option would be most suitable for my situation.

68 The inclusions tend to come in packages: i.e. a designer (basic) or platinum (luxury) package with various upgrades. The package is essentially standardised, so generally there is one brand and type of oven, cook top, bath, basin, taps, shower, vanity and so on included in your package. You may however get to choose between 4 cornice profiles, 5 styles of entry door, and 10 types of kitchen finish (such as country style or contemporary).

Window coverings, furniture and general interior decor are not included in the package and are therefore subject to individual choice once the home is built. When going in and out of the various homes at Homeworld, it is the furnishings and decorative features that tend to stand out against a blur of standardised backgrounds: a gilt mirror here, a painting there, a modern or traditional style of furniture and so on. The big decisions having been made, the owners can concentrate on making individual choices to give their home what they feel to be their own individual style. (However it must be added that since stylists are making choices from large home ware stores to furnish the interiors of the display homes, the differences are apparent rather than real.)

What is actually going on here? How individual or different are the results? The home buyer encounters apparently a myriad of choices and feels that they are tailoring the home to their own specific needs only to end up with a home that is pretty much the same as everyone else’s. In fact, it is likely that the secret of Homeworld’s success is related to this constraint, since the anxiety of making real choices is replaced by the security of choosing within a selected field. Whatever choices are made, the result will be socially acceptable and will fit in with the neighbours. If you can afford it, however, you can express increased status by choosing a larger more impressive design with more decorative and palace-like features.

In choosing a Homeworld package, the steps are defined and sequential: choose floor plan according to basic requirements (say one from twenty); choose a façade that is contemporary or traditional, modest or imposing (say one from ten); choose colour schemes from offered range; choose fittings package (one from two); choose kitchen finish (say one from ten); and so on. When these negotiations are concluded, the deposit is paid, the mortgage is arranged, and the builder then constructs the house. On completion, the keys are handed to the client who then adds their “personal touch” by choosing curtains, furniture, cushions, bedding, mirrors, and artworks. Much care and devotion is applied to the choices of interior furnishings (as a weekend visit to any homeware store or complex will show). Is this creation of individual style more an

69 illusion than a reality? Even our “individual style” is likely to conform to norms and aspirations largely dictated by our cultural background, social class, and aspirations. (See Chapter 5)

A noticeable feature of the Homeworld experience is the focus on interior living spaces. The emphasis is on buying a lifestyle. The advertising always features a happy, young couple with a beautiful child, inside their sparkling new home, enjoying a perfect and relaxed family life. These houses are created for a nuclear family of mum, dad and the kids, with little account of singles, same sex or childless couples or the many other varieties of household groups.

In a visit to Homeworld, the street view of the houses is almost secondary as you are funnelled from one interior to another. The blandness, sameness and downright boring nature of suburbs created from these types of houses is inescapable. There is not much emphasis on outdoor space as such. The floor plan takes up most of the block with the remaining space devoted to a driveway or small courtyard/patio area off the living room (a garden room). The garage, usually double, and opened by remote, is invariably at the front and connected to the house via an interior door, thus eliminating any necessary interaction with the street or the neighbours when entering and exiting. Homeworld suburbs (e.g. Kellyville, Glenmore Park) seem to exude a sense of collective isolation rather than a sense of community, with street after street of repetitive buildings within which isolated families are cocooned and marooned. Rachel Whiteread’s work speaks to this isolation of modern suburbia and the underlying alienation of ‘self’. In Place (2008) she has created a conglomerated settlement of 200 houses under a darkened sky, with lights on in every window, but otherwise entirely abandoned. This carefully constructed settlement where there is no one home seems to speak of both isolation and emptiness.

70

Rachel Whiteread Place (Village), 2006/2008 Rachel Whiteread, House, Concrete, 1993 Mixed media (Doll houses, crates, boxes, wood, Commissioned by Artangel electrical fixtures and fittings, electricity) © Rachel Whiteread Courtesy of the artist, © Rachel Whiteread; Dimensions variable. Photo credit: Sue Ormerod Installation view from Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture at The Hayward, London Photo: Mike Bruce

In Ghost (1990) Whiteread made a plaster cast of a room in an old house, revealing its back-to-front contours, its inside-out fireplace and doorknob, its details of wallpaper and wainscoting while in House she has cast the interior of an entire building. She describes these pieces as ‘mummified space’: the interior or inhabited space has become a solid entity, excluding others and the world outside.

If building a house is analogous to constructing an identity, then there are some interesting parallels between the Homeworld phenomenon and the construction of self and identity in contemporary western society where the desire to be an individual conflicts with the forces which pressure the individual to conform to social norms. While we may appear to have free reign in choosing who we become, the options may not be as infinite or open as we imagine. This investigation focuses on the extent to which there is real and actual freedom of choice in the construction of self.

4.2 In my mother’s house project

Playing on the metaphor of Homeworld, the In my mother’s house project explores how the house of self is built or constructed. It considers the nature of the templates from which we choose to build our identity; the floor plan or blueprint of heredity, family and early experience; the construction of our persona, or the facade we present to the world, followed by the furnishing of the interior. Notions around patterning, imprinting, the relationship between the individual and the society and most particularly, the ability of the individual to choose and change are explored. The investigation was an intensely

71 personal one, while at the same time exploring ideas and inferences that might be widely applicable.

The exhibition “In my mother’s house”. ATVP, March-April 2012

The installation “In my mother’s house” was designed to evoke a sense of architectural space without actually being a house or a building. The vast size of the pieces within the room casts the audience in a position of interiority, while the piece Mansion Package 1, which hangs obliquely across the entrance, frames the installation and creates a doorway through which one must pass to enter. A large triangular space has been removed from the centre of the piece creating the stage set doorway (and becoming the basis for the piece Mansion package 2).

Catherine Kennedy In my mother’s house (entrance view) At The Vanishing Point, Newtown, 2012

The installation, forming strangely oblique architectural spaces explores the way that the self is constructed. Entering its interior implies an exploration of the inner self.

Sideshow alley at the Easter how was a powerful and fascinating experience for me as a child. On an open piece of ground, with the aid of tents and temporary wooden pieces, the space would be transformed, almost overnight, into a myriad of forbidden, magical and terrifying realities. The large, hanging, un-stretched canvases allude to side-show alley and the carnival, and imply an alternative or psychological space such as is found

72 in the Magic Theatre (“not for everybody”), in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf29, or in the 1920s film The cabinet of Dr Caligari. 30 The sense of entering an alternate world, where anything is possible and where normal rules do not apply, allows for reading of the narratives contained within, as existing in a psychological, rather than actual space.

The title references and subverts Christ’s words concerning the after-life: “In my father’s house are many mansions.”31 The implication is that there is more to be known than what is apparent: that there are many houses, many rooms, many realities or levels and many ways of looking at things.

The conceptual metaphor relating the house and the psyche is central to the installation. The identity, which evolves in adolescence, is a construction, often hastily built of a mixture of popular culture, education, social conditioning, along with the more personal influences of home and family. The balance between finding one’s own path and fitting in with the collective is ongoing. Choices are not as free as we believe and conforming pressures are probably much stronger than most of us realise. As Alain de Botton points out in his book Status Anxiety,32 we are social animals and the pressures to place ourselves favourably within the social hierarchy, is possibly innate.

The individual pieces examine the broader intersection between the self and the world and explore different aspects of how the self and identity are constructed. Some of the subjects that are explored are the formation of self and identity; the relationship of the individual to the family, society and other groupings; networks, and connections; social pressures such as isolation and exclusion; choices and imprinting. The installation is experienced like the Homeworld village where the audience, on entering, becomes a part of the stage set environment.

The works also read together like stage scenery where of course “all the world’s a stage” and all of us “players”33 and one piece relates to another in a myriad of ways as the installation is experienced.

29 The novel Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (1926) 30 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and uses stylized sets, with abstract, jagged buildings painted on canvas 31 John 14:2 32 De Botton, Alan. Status anxiety Simon and Schuster 2004 33 William Shakespeare. Macbeth

73 4.3 The individual works: In my mother’s house

The vast spaces, the rich textured crimson and gold decor and the melodramatic film posters of suburban picture theatres is an aesthetic I have absorbed from my early childhood. The format of these paintings is, to some degree, inspired by the movie posters of my childhood in which images and text were ‘montaged’ to dramatic effect.

Using the imagic language of the subconscious, and via a deeply personal analysis, the works investigate the nature of wider or more universal constructions of meaning. Within the one piece, images combine and play off each other echoing the nature of experienced reality, where memory, emotion and thought overlap. Images of stairs, lights, mirrors, power lines are recurring motifs, alluding to notions of status, reflection and power, illumination and communication. Patterns, such as the stencilled lace, not only provide a unifying motif but also talk about underlying patterns of behaviour, and overlaid patterns of social acceptability. Painting and transferred images are mixed together in a way that questions what is real and what is not, while stencilling of image and text brings a street art immediacy to the work.

Mansion package (1 and 2)

Mansion Package draws on the architecture and terminology of Homeworld (essentially from an exterior (1) and interior (2) viewpoint) and implies the idea of how, by building our perfect home, we seek to build a perfect life. The metaphor of Homeworld also highlights the concept of choice in relation to the construction of self. Package deals, in life as in home purchase, contain a set of features and conditions: some desirable and some less so. The interior piece is formed from the cut-out triangle and depicts features of the mansion’s palatial interior, with its columns, gilt edged mirrors and staircases. These images combine with the ‘Little Golden Books’ memories of happy childhood and the image of Judy Garland singing Somewhere over the Rainbow to talk about the package we wish to buy/create. The threatening sky, festooned with power lines, the disconsolate line of Waiting for Godot-like characters who appear to be holding up the mansion whilst chained to another reality,34 and the stencilled graffiti “it’s not about the money” allude to other less desirable aspects of the package deal that we might also be signing up for.

34 In Samuel Becket’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot, two characters Vladimir and Estragon wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot

74

Catherine Kennedy Mansion package 2 (2012). Acrylic, photo-transfer, stencil, gold leaf on canvas.

Mansion package 2 (detail) Installation view (At The Vanishing Point, Newtown, 2012)

Losing it

A large 1960’s illustration of an adolescent female face (appropriated from a story in the Cherry Ames Girls’ Annual called Penelope Gets the Message)35 is peeping through the doorway and over the second piece of the Mansion package.

Losing it looks at the construction of identity in adolescence and the influence of the childhood home (or rebellion against it) and all that it symbolises in this construction. Decorative and fanciful, in the pink and blue (and primrose too) of an adolescent girl’s dreams and fantasies, the retro style adolescent girl’s face is overhung by the image of

35 In Cherry Ames girl’s annual 1963. Cherry Ames is the central character in a series of 27 mystery novels with hospital settings published by Grosset & Dunlap between 1943 and 1968. Cherry Ames is emblematic of a whole genre of writing for girls: the heroines were “plucky” within a context of accepted female behaviour in a very much male dominated society. It thereby references the limited horizons for females at that time and emphasises social norms of acceptability.

75 childhood home and its reflection and surrounded by comic book illustrations of various “scenes”.

Referencing movie posters of the 50s and 60s and images of popular culture of the same era, it highlights the way in which much of the moulding of an individual’s identity is culture/time/place specific. The embedded text, containing ambiguous but loaded phrases (such as you shouldn’t have…. /what did you expect?) not only questions the way we communicate with each other but also emphasises how language functions to embed prevailing morals, duties and behaviours. Phrases constantly repeated by parents and teachers become part of our adult inner dialogue even though we might reject the more outward manifestations of their tenets.

Combining painted images with transferred images, gold leaf and stencil patterns, the watercolour glazes and rich embellishments speak of memories and of the theatre.

Catherine Kennedy Losing it, 2012 Losing it (detail) Acrylic, photo-transfer, gold leaf and stencil on unstretched canvas

76

Losing it (detail) Losing it (detail)

Clueless

Hovering just above the floor and also at a strangely oblique angle is Clueless. Based on the Parker Brothers game Cluedo,36 and also referencing the idea of a house’s floor plan, this work combines images of the game board with images of home and family.

Games have rules and this particular game has as its basis the deduction of a crime. It investigates how we learn to play ‘the game of life’, where the rules of the game are not so much given, as deduced from our early experiences. These early experiences and what we learn from them become the basis of our adult modus operandi and thus the floor plan of ‘self.’ The crime that is committed against a nameless victim by one or other of the household members stands as a metaphor for early negative experiences which can be powerful formative influences on the individual’s psyche. On the basis of childhood experience, the individual learns what to expect as well as what is

36 ‘Cluedo’ is a murder/mystery themed, deduction board game devised by Anthony Pratt and originally published in England in 1949. The players must correctly deduce the facts of a hypothetical crime: where it was committed, by whom and with which implement, to win. (As in: ‘Colonel Mustard, in the library with the candlestick’). I played this game as a child but was particularly unsuccessful at it. When I had cause to play the game again as an adult I had a revelatory moment (Aha! experience) when I saw that my previous method of carefully eliminating, (and remembering) all the false options was way too tedious, slow and doomed to failure. Instead, I realised, that one needed to hypothesise a target if one was to have a chance of winning. The implications of this realisation, in terms of my life experience and the need for strategising, were profound and devastating.

77 “acceptable” behaviour. The need to ferret out maladapted features of the floor plan of self is implied.

Overlaid on the game board and the floor plan are images referencing a tablecloth and at the centre of the piece is the image of the washing machine agitating back and forth in a perpetual and repetitive motion. Montaged into the piece are images of stairs, mirrors and chandelier, as well as stencilled patterns and text. A narrative of many layers is formed.

Installed a few inches above the floor, the audience views the piece as if looking down into the foundations of the house and seeing the cast of characters there, along with the rules and strategies for playing. Viewed from above, the house reveals the blueprint from which the edifice is constructed. The tablecloth brings up ideas around nurturing, sharing and distribution of resources.

Catherine Kennedy Clueless (Installation view) Clueless, 2012 (in process) Acrylic, photo-transfer and stencil on unstretched canvas

Inherit

On the opposite wall, and also slightly obscured by the Mansion triangle suspended in space, is the large carpet-like piece Inherit. This piece is a vertical landscape with images of a well, a road, a bridge, a doorway, a gate, a set of steps, and a monument

78 moving up the canvas and seeming to portray a journey to a far distant, exotic landscape. (An image of the full piece can be seen in chapter 3). The image of a heart, enclosing a linen cupboard in the centre of the piece, speaks of things hidden and revealed, remembered and forgotten, and of linen clean and dirty.

Inherit considers the role of duty, obligation, laws and social expectations, in relation to the individual’s life journey. The piece was a response to a deeply-felt personal conflict between duties and obligations, personal freedoms and life choices. The spray- stencilled lace patterning that appears and reappears across the carpet implies notions of patterning, imprinting and overlaid social responsibilities, while the embedded, repeated text In her it refers to family duties and responsibilities and duties which largely fall on the female family members. This large 3-metre piece references an heirloom carpet, handed down through the generations like the implied responsibilities. The colours, predominantly reds and oranges, combine with gold leaf to reflect the richness of heritage. The edges of the carpet are patterned with images of the twining wisteria vine, which has beautiful flowers and a memorable perfume but the vine eventually gains a stranglehold and destroys its host.

Catherine Kennedy Inherit, 2012 (detail) Inherit (detail) Inherit (detail)

Better to rule

The title of this piece is from Milton’s Paradise Lost.37 The central image, of the expulsion of Satan from heaven, is appropriated from an illustration by Gustav Dore.38

37 Here at least we shall be free; the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice to reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

79 This image, in referencing the story of the struggle for power between God and the angels, makes available to the piece, all the associated and underlying ideas around power and choice. Below this image is a dark owl shape and partially obscured and falling through space, are the images of dead fowls. Embedded in the images, fragments of text (from ‘Who killed cock robin?’) are faintly readable.

Better to rule looks not only at the impact of religion, the accepted morals of society, and all of what is taught to be ‘good and right’ behaviour on the individual, but also highlights the ongoing tension between the needs of the group and that of the individual. Social norms, morals, and religion can be used to extend the group’s power, since group inclusion requires acceptance of its laws and hierarchies in return for the strength and protection provided. To reject the underlying socio-moral rules and thus stand outside the group makes the individual vulnerable and a prey to destructive forces. Bird images combine with the fragments of ‘Who killed cock robin’39 text, highlighting the concept of pecking order. The group’s stated ethos and apparent co-operation may actually be no assurance of safety and benefit for a particular individual.

Catherine Kennedy Better to rule (2012) Catherine Kennedy Johnny’s in the basement (2012) Acrylic, photo-transfer and stencil on Acrylic, photo-transfer and stencil on unstretched canvas unstretched canvas

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

38 Gustave Dore’ woodcut illustration from Book 4 of Paradise Lost published in 1863 39 The death and burial of cock Robin. A traditional English rhyme, with mythological and political antecedents, of uncertain origin and first published in Tom Thumb’s pretty song book. In the poem all the other birds, saw him die, offer to bury him, preach at the funeral etc. but no one it seems, attempted to save him.

80

Johnny’s in the basement (mixing up the medicine)

Menacing crocodiles are circling at the base of Johnny’s in the basement, as if guarding a walled compound of empty garages, on top of which is a large dark town. The sensation is of being in the bowels of a fortified town whose windows and doors are shut. A furtive face peers out from behind a blind: an individual who seems defensive and threatened.

The title of this piece is a line from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean homesick blues”.40 The besieged self, exemplified by the home as fortress, retreats into a private space, and hostile stance when the pace is too fast, the intrusions too many, the race unwinnable. In concert with Don’t lose that number and Mansion Package there are pointers to a dystopian future with crises for the individual psyche. Based on images of Katoomba, I began this piece while working as a census collector there and experiencing the way that so many people had become recluses, barricading themselves into their own private space.

The house of self does not exist in isolation but within a town or environment of other dwellings. The images, suggestive of a guarded fortress, raise questions about interrelationship and communication.

Don’t lose that number

Exiting the space requires once more passing through the triangular doorway of Mansion package, the reverse of which echoes the acid colours and neurone shapes in the sky of Don’t lose that number which directly faces the exiting viewer. This dark and anxious piece with its tangled wires, shattered glass and broken phone box speaks not only of communication breakdown but also about trying to find our way home.

This piece alludes to failures of communication, both within and without. With smart phones, smart cards and a million passwords and security options we’re in danger of becoming hostage to our own inventions. Everything is relying on the grid. If it breaks down we’re stranded or if we forget the password, we’re excluded. Layers of textures of

40 On Highway 61 revisited, Columbia records, 1965

81 shattered glass, tangled wires and strings of unrelated numbers form the background to the main images

It’s a truism that the more communication options we have, the less we are actually communicating.41 When lines of communication are down, relationships falter. When neurons become entangled and memory defaults, we lose our identity. Old people with dementia are stranded in a nightmare world, constantly trying to get home, while having no idea at all of where home is.

Catherine Kennedy Installation view (At The Vanishing Point, Newtown) Don’t lose that number (2012) Acrylic, photo-transfer and stencil on canvas

In building the house of self, there are patterns and prototypes we are following, external forces operating on us and we are, to some degree, constrained in our choices. Heredity, culture and upbringing might be seen as providing the templates or floor plan from which we construct our identity. The persona or the face we present to the world may be largely constructed from models presented by our situation within the socio-

41 See Sheri Terkel, Alone together

82 economic and cultural framework, while our inner or private selves, where we believe we are most truly free, might still be subject to conditioning and imprinting.

The installation ‘In my mother’s house’ is a personal exploration of the context in which the self and identity are constructed. The insight gained into how much of the individual is due to/embedded in the cultural and social institutions in which it grows and exists, leads to a somewhat Foucaultian position. Early childhood experiences, the family environment, education, religion, prevailing culture and social mores, all interact with the individual in the formation of the self. The Homeworld metaphor highlights questions around underlying parameters and the nature of individual choice and freewill.

The In my mother’s house project led back to the underlying questions in relation to self and identity: How can the individual be truly himself or herself? How do we exercise freewill: make choices unfettered by patterning and imprinting?

Is the formation of the house of self ultimately constrained by the forces operating on us, and is our adult self essentially fixed and resistant to change, or is it possible to reconstruct or renovate the self to be more open, more flexible and to exercise a positive free will?

4.4 Remaking the house of self

Buying and selling real estate together with home renovation could almost be called a national pastime, but how do we renovate or rebuild the house of self?

While it has long been believed that the human brain is analogous to a machine that is ‘hardwired’ and our natures and behaviours more or less ‘fixed’, recent studies in neuroplasticity indicate that our brains, our nature and nervous systems are potentially modifiable. (Doidge, 2008)

The initial evidence for this theory has come from work with patients with difficult and often strange disorders, where there has been neurological damage and consequential loss of specific abilities. (For example, in the case of loss of speech after a stroke, some patients have relearned speech using a different part of the brain.) It would now seem that the “normal” brain changes its structure with every activity performed, constantly perfecting its circuits to be better suited to the task in hand.

83 However, the more often a skill is performed, a memory recalled or an association made, the stronger those pathways...and vice versa. Parts of the brain that are unexercised or unused, may in fact be recolonised by different functions and pathways. Defence mechanisms, such as disassociation, become plastically learned by constant repetition and relationships and associations (such as early triggers for fear, or sexual arousal) however logically irrelevant can become fixed responses.

Pascual Leone (in Doidge, 2008) showed that normally sighted subjects when placed in conditions of total darkness for only a few days, showed distinct brain reorganisation, with the visual cortex beginning to process tactile and auditory skills. This led them to the concept of ‘roadblocks’ (in this case ‘total darkness’, since with any light at all, the visual cortex preferred to attempt visual processing). In the face of roadblocks to the established pathway, it would appear that massive reorganisation could occur with some speed. Areas of the brain are not necessarily fixed, and information may in fact be processed in different sites. Still, in the absence of such a major necessity to reorganise, underlying change is less likely. Also, as we age, behaviours and responses tend to become embedded, and it becomes harder for us to change our responses to the world.

Doidge (2008) views psychoanalysis as a neuroplastic therapy in that it may provide an opportunity to change dysfunctional behaviours and responses. By gaining insight into our learned responses, it may be possible to identify triggers, and ultimately to change them. Doidge (2008) believes that “Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories into words and into context so that they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories so that they become conscious explicit memories and no longer need to relive or re-enact them” (p 231)

However, as Alfred Hitchcock famously pointed out42 “Psychiatrists say that if you can trace the origin of your fear it will disappear. The whole thing is a confounded lie, because I still have it. It’s never left me.”

The bottom line seems to be that while changes to the brain and to the self are possible, in reality, we are only likely to create new pathways when the usual pathway is blocked, that is, change is only likely to occur when we have no other real option. The need for

42 Alfred Hitchcock was traumatized by his mother. On the Dick Cavett show www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q-QAsi7Ge0

84 change must thus be seen not only as evident and necessary but that need must be felt as urgent and imperative.

4.5 The authentic self and making genuine choices

The development of an authentic self would seem to depend on being able to gain some insight into the forces that shape us. By viewing our own behaviour more objectively, processing our experience not just from the inside but more as if it were a story or narrative of someone else’s life, there might be a possibility of carving new and less predictable pathways. Without such self-reflection and assessment, however, it is likely that we will be condemned to a kind of Groundhog Day 43 existence, where we are caught up in predictable and repetitive patterns of behaviour. Every new day might offer potential for change but actually be equivalent to the same day repeating itself over and over again (as it does in the film), since the underlying templates and blueprints remain fixed.

By contrast, the 1999 film Sliding doors44 shows two utterly different potential life scenarios that ensue from a divergent moment where the lead character either catches or misses a train. The sliding doors trope (the train doors, the lift doors) implies a fluidity of future possibilities that relates not so much to serendipitous fate but more importantly to the way that the future pivots on the millions of small (and apparently insignificant) choices we make every day. The implication is that reality becomes fixed by the narrowness of our vision: by the predictability of our behaviour and the choices we make. Radically different outcomes and the opening up of many and varied possibilities however might result from making even small changes in our choices.

Genuine choice, a truly creative existence, is only possible where we gain some kind of insight into our acquired structures: the inherited traits, learned behaviours, past experiences and emotions that drive us. There are patterns in everything, and without learning to see them we will inevitably be caught in their web. However having gained insight into dysfunctional underlying patterns, the ability to change them would seem to depend, at the very least, on our feeling an urgent and imperative need to do so.

43 The 1993 film Groundhog Day directed by Harold Ramis and starring Bill Murray depicts a TV anchor-man who finds himself repeating the same day over and over again

44 The 1998 film Sliding doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah was written and directed by Peter Howitt and distributed by Miramax films and Paramount pictures

85 Gaining insight into our habits and behavioural patterns is clearly a first step, but effecting actual change in our selves, is a large, and more difficult proposition.

How might we become truly at home with ourselves? How do we make ourselves at home in the world? Indeed, how might we find the way home to our authentic self?

References

Doidge, Norman. ‘The brain that changes itself” Scribe publications, Carlton, Vic., 2008

Jung, Carl. Memories, dreams, reflections (first published 1963) Fontana paperbacks, London, 1983

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Chapter 5

At home with myself, at home in the world

We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us. Winston Churchill

The house or home is both an internal concept and also something that we act out upon the world: a mirroring if you will. The home we make is a symbolic externalisation of the self, while our idea of “home” and the dreams we construct around the image of house and home are an internalisation of the self. Home is both a reflection and a projection. The notion of home, whether imagined, dreamt, designed or built, speaks about our sense of self and is complicated by the interweaving of these internal and external manifestations. In developing ideas about the metaphor of the house one must consider this infinite mirroring of internal and external.

5.1 Home and identity

The home can be seen as a key element in the development of people’s sense of themselves and of their sense of belonging.

The formation of the ego is an integrative process, requiring the building of a coherent and separate self: the integrated self is at home. When we are distressed we want to go home, to be frank about someone’s personal behaviour is a home truth, when we’re unwell we stay home, when we’re lost we want to find home, it’s always good to be back home and home is where the heart is. Home represents warmth, integrity and safety. It is an idea central to our existence and in the end it is a place within us.

In aged care facilities45, the demented elderly, lost in their minds and uprooted from their homes, are constantly trying to go home. Restless and agitated, they wander the corridors trying to get back to their known selves, rattling doors trying to get out, trying

45 The seeking home behaviour I describe here comes from my experience working as a recreational activities officer in an aged care facility that included a locked dementia unit between 2010 -2012

87 to find a way home. They display an overwhelming need to return to a place that is safe, comfortable, protecting and known. They seem to feel that if they could only get there, they would know themselves again and also be known by others. In their minds the actuality of home may take various symbolic forms and it may be described differently at different times: it may be a childhood home, it may be the home where they settled in adulthood and raised a family, it may be their last dwelling place or they may be unclear and become distressed by questions about location. What is clear however is that the notion of home and identity are intertwined and that home is a psychological and emotional space in which one ‘dwells’. It is thus symbolic of self and of identity at a deep psychological level.

A house is so much more than a physical space. Heidegger (1975) describes the dwelling or home as the key location in which a spiritual unity is found between people and things. The home shelters and protects and is the site of birthing, loving, living and dying. Making a dwelling according to Heidegger is more than to build or construct: it is to create, to nurture and to cultivate.

We choose a site, we clear a space, we make boundaries around that space, and we construct a shelter. The site, location, boundary within which we may build or construct a shelter are common to all dwellings (even those of the ‘homeless’) but in addition, we invest so much of ourselves in the creation of our homes.

Kimberley Dovey in Home and Homelessness (1985) distinguishes between house and home, saying that house is an object, a part of the environment whereas home is an emotionally based relationship between people and their environment or dwelling place. Dovey describes home as an “experienced meaning”. The concept of home relates to ideas around order and identity. Being at home is “a mode of being whereby we are oriented within a spatial, temporal and sociocultural order that we understand” (Dovey, 1985, p35.) Our home environment is imbued with familiarity of past experience. It is predictable and we can relax within stability of routine behaviour and experience. (P37) Home as order has a strong cognitive element, while home as identity is primarily affective and emotional and describes a merging of person and place (home is where the heart is). The place takes identity from dweller and dweller takes identity from the place: who we are and where we are, are interrelated.

88 5.2 House as mirror of self

In addition, we act out upon the world an idea of self in the houses we set up and inhabit. According to Clare Cooper Marcus in her in-depth study “House as a mirror of self” (1994), we need to display in our physical environments, messages from the unconscious about who we are, who we were, and who we might become. We need to place it ‘out there’ for us to contemplate, just as we need to view our physical body in a mirror. Jung (1969) said of designing and building his own house that he needed to ‘concretize’ his psyche.

Going in and out of people’s abodes you get a sense of how people are establishing their identity, making themselves feel secure and also perhaps reflecting a particular or desirable persona. Over the last few years I have occupied, for varying lengths of time, a large number of different dwellings and this experience has given me an opportunity to experience how other people live and to reflect on the relationship between house and psyche.

The fortuitous and serendipitous process of house sitting gradually evolved from minding the houses of friends, to relatives of friends and to friends of friends of friends. Living three hours’ commuting distance from the university, made minding someone’s city house an attractive proposition. Over the years of this project I luxuriated in a Balmoral mansion, slept on the floor of an old house entirely hidden by overgrowth while it was being sold, shared a fabulous terrace in Enmore with a slightly troubled cat-princess, chased rabbits, guinea pigs and dogs around a large family house in Waverley, hid out in a hilltop perch in Manly Vale, retreated to the leafy green gardens of Pymble, stayed over in a country style basement flat in Erskineville; and explored the trendy streets of Balmain.

House sitting is unique. By stepping into somebody’s home you step into his or her life. Because they have walked away from their home temporarily (usually to travel), everything is set up with their accoutrements to living: you look after their animals, collect their mail, water their garden, view their views and find where they keep their breadboard. Just by using their bathroom, their kitchen, their balcony, shopping in their neighbourhood, you are temporarily seeing through their eyes and experiencing life from their point of view. It is a little like taking on the persona of the person whose house you are occupying. You are in their dwelling and to some extent dwelling in them. Inviting a house sitter into your home is an act of supreme trust since the house

89 owner is allowing the sitter into their interior and private space, with potential access to their intimate and secret self.

Importantly, I found every house to bear an intrinsic relationship to its owner: not only in obvious ways such as street presence or the way the house was decorated and furnished, but in subtler ways. Houses seemed to reflect their owners (maybe people reflected their houses) so that houses were simpatico (or not) despite their objective virtues. Some houses were outgoing, some inward looking; some exuberant and fun, some quiet and low energy. Some houses were well organised, energising and easy to live and work in. Others were difficult, nothing seemed to work or flow, and they were not relaxing to be in.

Each house also exists within a different environment and social milieu. As Cooper Marcus (1995) points out, the setting in which the house exists is as important to the individual’s identity and sense of feeling at home as the house itself. She describes ‘neighbourhood as metaphor’ and investigates various social, emotional and physical settings, (inner city, suburban, semi rural, upmarket, rundown neighbourhoods etc.). Her research led her to conclude that we have a settlement identity, an environment that suits us. “Where you live and what you see around you are a reflection of who you are or who society says you are.” (Cooper Marcus, 1995. p213)

Mallet (2004) points out that homemaking is essential to the human experience. “How we function as persons links to how we make ourselves at home” “Our residence is where we live but our home is how we live” (Ginsburg, 1994, quoted in Mallet, 2004, p 83).

The way we furnish our home and the objects we keep and display in them serve many functions: they are utilitarian and decorative, kept for their memories or displayed to enhance status. Our choices of furniture and furnishings may be a way of expressing our style or individuality or of a seeking to find that. The current focus on our homes and on home renovation (as reflected in the proliferation of reality TV shows) and with constant updating and refurbishing, may be displaying a restlessness of spirit and an uncertainty of self as much as a seeking of status and perfection. Elliott’s recent study (Elliott, 2013) draws together current obsessions with house renovation, personal and celebrity makeovers, cosmetic surgery, life coaching and psychotherapy within the concept of reinvention. He says that reinvention is an endemic notion in our society, which highlights an underlying belief that the perfect life can be achieved through effort

90 and that by implication we can create, by various interventions, the perfect self. Our homes and our ‘selves’ both seem to exist within a continually, competitive market.

Many individuals however go the other way and exhibit an increasing failure to maintain any sense of order in their surroundings. A high degree of clutter or disorder in the home is often seen as an unfavourable reflection of an individual’s state of mind. This relationship is highlighted by the recent inclusion of “hoarding disease” in the manual of psychological disorders.46 . Reality TV shows such as The hoarder next door 47have drawn attention to this phenomenon and highlighted the relationship between a sense of personal loss (death, divorce etc.) and encasing oneself in a ‘rat’s nest’ of stuff. Houses that become repositories of useless matter and spaces that are entirely filled so that the inhabitants cannot move or think seem to create a kind of a security blanket for the disordered psyche, enclosing and cushioning the individual and deflecting the outside world.

Traces of self in our homes are caught between securing private identity and positioning ourselves within a social context. The Turner prize winning artist Grayson Perry looks at this social context and makes merry with the concept of individual expression or “taste” pointing out just how much our homes, and the way we decorate and furnish them, (our perceived identity) is moulded/ dictated by our social milieu or aspirations. He identifies and describes class differences in taste in Britain but his observations are broadly applicable in the way our taste is circumscribed by our identifying with a subgroup within the prevailing culture. His compelling documentary “All in the best possible taste”, 48 convincingly, even if anecdotally, shows just how much of our

46 Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders APA American Psychiatric Association)

47 The Hoarder Next Door is a British documentary series about compulsive hoarding. Produced by Twenty Twenty and shown on Channel 4, it features psychotherapist Stelios Kiosses helping extreme hoarders. Olivia Colman narrates the show

48 All In The Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry is a 2012 documentary television series on United Kingdom station Channel 4, starring Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry. The series analysed the ideas of taste held by the different social classes of the United Kingdom. Perry produced a series of six tapestries depicting the taste ideas of Britons, entitled "The Vanity of Small Difference." The middle class, according to Perry, like to project an identity that is a blend of education, cultural (artistic) appreciation, and social conscience.

91 identity and perceived individuality is moulded by our social grouping and by the pervading, popular culture. To greater and lesser degrees we set up our homes as a kind of display of who we are, who we would like to be and perhaps more importantly, who we think we should be.

Perry made a series of tapestries, (based on Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress) depicting what he identifies as the particular style and identity of the lower, middle and upper class in Britain today.

Grayson Perry The vanity of small differences Grayson Perry The vanity of small differences

The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012 Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012 Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry 200 x 400 cm 78 3/4 x 157 1/2 in 200 x 400 cm 78 3/4 x 157 1/2 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Grayson Perry. Photography: Stephen White © Grayson Perry. Photography: Stephen White

In another recent study “Snoop-what your stuff says about you” (Gosling, 2008), Gosling proposes that an individual’s character or identity can be read by analysing his/her private spaces. According to Gosling we leave traces that are personal, social and inadvertent and like a detective Gosling reads these traces in our home environment as clues to aspects of the individual’s character.

5.3 Being At home

The concept of dwelling, of being at home with oneself, is essential to the stability of the psyche. As Bachelard (1969) points out “The house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams the dwelling places of our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.” (P5) “The house has one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, dreams and memories of mankind” (p6) and “without it man would be a dispersed being” (p 8)

92 At a time of crisis and grief in my life and under extreme stress, I returned to my house one evening to experience a profound sense of disassociation. Nothing was familiar. It felt like I was in a stranger’s house and I had a terrifying feeling that I was floating, drifting away into nothingness. Around the same time I had a series of dreams of being in the wrong house. I felt that I really needed something to anchor me to the earth, to pull me back into my life.

Familiar objects and surroundings can provide a psychological and emotional weight, a sense of inner security of who we are, and this sense of familiarity of our own territory is comforting and necessary. In detention centres, prisons, and nursing homes, the loss of identity is enhanced by the lack of personal objects, furniture and possessions that help people to belong. In the Army, uniform clothing and living quarters serves to privilege the group over the individual.

A sense of being at home can be seen as an activity or relationship as much as a place. There is a sense of being at home when we do what we do best and enjoy most, or when in a state of reciprocal acceptance (i.e. in the company of those whom we understand and who understand us). Being at home is also a sense of being happy and relaxed in our own skin. Feelings of anxiety, shame, guilt or inferiority can cause us severe discomfort and engender a desire to escape from situations and from ourselves and counter our ability to be at home.

In Jackson’s (1995) book “At home in the world” he says we feel at home when what we do has some effect and what we say carries some weight: when we find a balance between shaping and being shaped, between world mastery and alienation.

5.4 Structure or framework of home

The home also provides a structure or framework from which and through which the individual acts upon the world. The self resides in a body and the body resides in a home.

To lose one’s home can be seen as a profound psychological and emotional loss. Beresford (2013) in her paper “Chelsea: security shelter, sanctuary examines our attachment to place, particularly our home, the part that attachment plays in the individual’s sense of security and the devastating effects of its loss.

93 “In all societies the home is more than a physical structure. The house is the site of lived relationships especially those of kinship and sexuality and is a key link in the relationship between culture and sociality: a concrete marker of social position and status” (McDowell, 1999)

Domestic space is the 'material representation of the social order' and 'social reproduction is achieved through the symbolic perpetuation of the social order presented in the habitat.” (Bahloul, 1992)

As Bachelard (1969) says, “Not only our memories but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed’. Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms’ we learn to abide within ourselves.”

5.5 Cultural differences

The reality and symbolic meaning of the home combine to produce a particular version of home in different ways in different societies. Home has a particular resonance for migrants, refugees and travellers. Staying, leaving, journeying all relate to an idea of home that holds a wider sense, that includes the country of origin, the culture and traditions with which we are familiar. It is a place not only that we know but also where we are known. Home is a source of personal identity as well as status. It is also a place of familiarity and security and people’s experience of home influences the meaning and significance of their journeys beyond it.

“The term home functions as a repository for complex, interrelated, and at times contradictory socio cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces and things”. (Mallet, 2004, p84)

While a comparative study of cultural difference in the understanding and manifestation of home is outside the bounds of this paper, Musharbash’s (2008) fascinating and in- depth study of the Aboriginal community at Yuendumu in central Australia provides a conceptual framework for viewing relationships across cultures. Musharbesh interprets the metaphoric potency of the house via Heidegger’s ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ saying “that in order to dwell one has to build, and the way one builds mirrors the way one thinks: which in turn is inspired by the way one dwells, creating a processural cycle” (Musharbesh, 2008, p 4). She points to a multidirectional connectivity between the physical structures in which we live, our social practices and our world view, so that

94 the house metaphor exists with different implications but equal potency in many different contexts (Musharbesh, 2008, p 4). Cross-culturally then, different ways of dwelling encapsulate a particular way of looking at and being in the world.49

5.6 Childhood home

Our childhood home forms and informs our sense of self. The family or childhood home can be seen to represent our deepest roots or origins: a place that always exists inside us, our core structure. It forms the foundation of self and symbolises our formative environment and our central inner attitudes and values.

Bachelard (1969) says that our first home is that which allows us to form our first sense or grip in the world: it is the human being’s first world” and “the house we are born in is physically inscribed in us”. (Bachelard, p14). According to Cooper-Markus (1995) we either mirror the childhood home or react strongly against it, and Mallet (2004) describes the birth family house as holding “symbolic power as a formative dwelling place, a place of origin and return, a place from which to embark on a journey.”(p63)

In Walter Benjamin’s “A Berlin Childhood, 1900” the house, in particular the childhood home, is seen as a site of intersection of memory and meaning in his life. In this series of vignettes or stories, Benjamin uses places (e.g. the crooked street, the garden, the larder, hiding places), and objects (e.g. the telephone, the clock, the sewing box, and the desk) as a connection between past and present. This palimpsest of memories uses a method of superimposing or compositing imagery, with an overlaying of meaning and image, narrative, metaphor and philosophy. In this way, memory, meaning, present and future intersect in a place or an object. The objects act as a trigger for intensely recalling

49 The Warlpiri word ngurra can mean camp, burrow or nest, but also extends to include, place, country and land. This concept is represented as a series of concentric circles, while a specific camp in which people have slept, is represented by a combination of one horizontal and a number of vertical lines, representing a windbreak and number of sleeping persons. The position of sleepers within the camp relates to their complex social interrelationships and the camp is in essence a social rather than a physical structure. Musharbesh then represents ‘building dwelling thinking’ in the West as a pictogram of a square house with windows, door, roof and a front path, while the Warlpiri way of ‘building, dwelling, thinking’ is represented by the series of concentric circles. The ensuing difficulties in the settlement of Yuendumu are seen by Musharbesh to be a result of the intersection of these two different systems.

95 or reliving past/ childhood experiences. These memories are intense, formative and pregnant with import.

Understanding the way place and identity, object and memory are interwoven in a Berlin Childhood elucidates the way images of objects and places are often used in my work.

5.7 Bringing it all back home project

My work “Bringing it all back home” 50 was begun before the start of the current project but is described here as, in its exploration of the childhood home, it is the stepping off point for the rest of the work in the project. Bringing it all back home is a three-sided, house-like structure, created from six painted panels, with an open roof and a mirrored floor. Hanging from the roof are a number of pod-like shapes that are lit from within and in the bottom corner is a tap and a drain. While the walls enclose and define, the roof is only an outline and the floor’s mirrored surface reflects and repeats into the distance like a well.

Early relationships and experiences are pivotal in forming the house of self in which one dwells. Developing this piece involved observing relationships in the present, as well as observing the self within primary relationships from childhood within the family, and led to an unravelling of relationships and inter-human transactions, as associations were made and patterns became visible. In producing this alluvial narrative, another perspective began to emerge: that behind the soft face of family and friendship lurks an imprint of animal competition, pecking order and pack behaviour. I was led to insights around how early imprinting, and ways of behaving become part of the internal framework through which our adult selves operate in and view the world.

50 The name of this piece is the title of the first Bob Dylan album I owned. “Bringing it all back home” Columbia records 1965

96

Catherine Kennedy Bringing it all back home (Carriageworks install, 2010). Acrylic, photo-transfer, gold leaf, stencil on canvas. Wood, papier mache, mirror, plumbing fittings, lights, batteries, tree roots.

The house is not a closed system but is a site of constant movement in and out. The everyday functions of a house largely centre on the bodily requirements of the taking in of nourishment and the excretion of waste, signified by the tap and the drain. A house’s kitchen and bathroom are sites of a continuous and essential taking-in and giving-out, which can refer as easily to emotional and spiritual nourishment as to physical.

This piece also implies the dual nature of reflection via the pods that are lit from within, and shining out, as well as the mirror of the base that is reflecting back, repeating image and experience. There is thus a sense of both looking into the past and becoming the future.

Beginning with images of childhood and home, where the objects/places are imbued with Benjaminesque narratives (the shoes, the wardrobe, the sewing machine, the back door) I gradually added associated painted images, photographed and transferred images, and layers of paint, text and stencil. With new placements and associations, the

97 images start to form new narratives, relating to the formation of the psyche within the childhood home.

While the investigation was a personal one, it seems generally true that unpacking our emotional baggage and gaining insight into primal behaviours and learned responses from childhood might pave the way for gaining insights leading to more personal freedom and autonomy. By joining together many disparate feelings, relationships and associations, a new narrative starts to emerge. New narratives create the possibility of making new choices.

Bringing it all back home interior panels (F***ing cow, Family) Acrylic, photo-transfer, stencil on canvas

Bringing it all back home, exterior panels (No kiss for mother). Acrylic, photo-transfer on canvas

98 The mirrored central piece in the base of the work implies the depth of the unconscious as well as talking about reflection: reflection both in the sense of echoing and repeating as well as in the sense of meditation. The recent discovery of, and research into mirror neurons, which appear to be related to learning new skills by imitation as well as a neural basis for the human capacity for empathy, imply that we are constantly reflecting the world we encounter and the world is constantly reflecting ourselves back to us.51 In combination with the pods that are lit from within, and shining out, there is a sense of both looking into the past and becoming the future.

The childhood home is the psychic space in which the individual is formed. Parenting and early experience form a pivotal role in the incubation of the self. The childhood home will function as an incubator of the self and its success is dependent on protection and nurturing, not just of the physical self but also of the vulnerable psyche. The self will be both a reflection of its early experience and learning, and then a reflection of itself outwards into the world.

Bringing it all back home (detail of base)

51 For an in depth description of the complex notion of mirror neurons see “The empathic brain. How the discovery of mirror neurons changes our understanding of human nature.” Christian Keysers, Social brain press, 2011.

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Bringing it all back home (detail)

5.8 The duality of home

A dual nature of home began to emerge: the house we dream about and the house we build; the house we come from and the house we make. Home is both an internal construct and an external one. From the experience of ‘house sitting’ I saw how much each person’s personal space reflected aspects of themselves, while from my dreams and from meditation I could reflect on subconscious perceptions on the nature of self. The understanding of self that is gained by looking inward needs to be balanced by the understanding gained from observing one’s actions in the world. We form ourselves from within and that ‘inner self’ then projects itself outwards into the world.

I became unsettled about this duality as well as my inability to tie down notions of house and self. The idea of the house as a space that nurtures and protects us (Bachelard’s space for dreaming), conflicts with the idea of house as a space from which we view/look out onto the world. The house must both protect and inspire and an ideal dwelling must exhibit both refuge and prospect.

Being at home with ourselves, and a feeling of being at home in the world paradoxically began to be seen as relating not so much to a fixed or specific place or construct, as to attaining some kind of a balance between inner and outer notions of home or self, and between acting on and being acted upon.

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5.9 The journey home

Both the idea of the hero’s journey and of seeking home are part of a kind of shared psychic narrative that talks about a search for meaning and about finding or becoming one’s authentic self. This narrative is found in the stories of the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert and the search for the Promised Land; in the journeys of Ulysses and Siddhartha, in Psyche’s journey to the Underworld, in Dorothy’s seeking to return to Kansas, Frodo’s journey in ‘The lord of the rings’, the adventures of Hansel and Gretel and a thousand other tales “Some of the greatest literary and poetic achievements of all time, from the Odyssey to Ulysses and beyond, are about such a search for home. Such a search may have a religious expression, as in a pilgrimage or the search for the promised land (that is not necessarily a territory); it may take a sentimental turn, as in Oliver Twist and the Ugly Duckling; or a confused search, a journey in space for a home lost in time such as in the novels of Amos Oz” (Tucker 1994, p184)

Dorothy’s journey “The wizard of Oz” Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1939 (fair use)

In the film The Wizard of Oz there is a strong resonance with an odyssey or personal journey from childhood home, (from which one must be removed by force -and even so, in a sense, taking it with us52) to embark on a journey of self- knowledge. The quest to find home is often seen as an attempt to establish a genuine and unique personal identity, to become independent, to find a sense of authentic self and thus to be at home.

Tucker (1994) suggests that most people spend their lives in search of home, looking for a place where they will be fulfilled: a personal journey in search of the Promised Land.

52 ABC book show

101 We all harbour notions of the ideal home although for most of us it will be, in reality, a compromise between our ideals and the constraints operating on us.

102 References

The Book show, ABC Radio National with Ramona Koval, 26/1/2011 Dreams and Nightmares and literature Highlights from the 2010 Cheltenham Literature festival with Jonathon Bate University) Daniel Pick (University of London) and Sarah Churchwell (University of East Anglia) Radio National

Bahloul, J. The architecture of memory: a Jewish Muslim household in Colonial Algeria. 1937-1962. Cambridge. Cambridge university press, 1992.

Bachelard, G. Tr. Orion Press 1964. The poetics of space. Beacon press. Boston, Mass, 1969.

Benjamin, W. Tr. H. Eiland. Berlin childhood around 1900. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2006.

Beresford, Melanie. Chelsea: security, shelter, sanctuary. A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements of Master of Fine Art, UNSW, 2013

Bourdieu, P. Social space and symbolic power Sociological theory, 7. 1989

Bhaba, H. The location of culture. London, Routledge. 1994

Cooper -Marcus, Clare. House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home. Conari Press. Berkeley California, 1995.

Dovey, K. Home and homelessness in Altman, I and Werner, C.M. (eds) Home Environments. Plenum Press, New York, 1985

Elliott, Anthony. Reinvention. Routledge, London and New York: 2013

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, language and thought. Harper and Row, New York, 1975

Jackson, M. At home in the world. Harper Perennial, Pymble N.S.W. 1995

Jung, C. Memories, dreams, reflections. London, Collins Fontana library, 1969

Gosling, Sam. Snoop: what your stuff says about you. New York; Basic Books c2008

Mallett, S. Understanding home. A critical review of the literature. The Sociological review, 2004. Volume 52 (1) pp.62-69

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McDowell, Linda. Gender society and place. Understanding feminist geographies Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford. UK. 1999

Musharbash, Y. Yuendumu Everyday. Contemporary life in remote Aboriginal Australia. Aboriginal Studies Press. Canberra, Australia, 2008.

Tucker, A. In search of home. Journal of applied psychology. 11 (2) 1994 p181-187

104 Chapter 6

No direction home. Just passing through

How does it feel to be on your own,

Like a complete unknown

With no direction home,

Like a rolling stone.

Like a rolling stone. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 revisited, 1965 53

The title No direction home is both homage to Bob Dylan, post production artist par excellence, and an examination of the underlying question: how do we find direction or meaning within the fear and uncertainty of these postmodern times? Having extinguished the ‘grand narratives’ of history, religion and progress we stare down the barrel of annihilation alone. How do we find our way? What new narratives might we create/are we creating?

The journey home, the trope of the seeking or yearning for home is a psychic narrative of the self yearning to find itself; of our underlying seeking for a meaning to our existence. However, as Massumi (1993, p10) points out “The core narrative of the postmodern is fear…In postmodern times we live permanently in the shadow of the imminent disaster.”

“Society’s prospectivity has changed modes. What society looks toward now is no longer a return to the Promised Land but a general disaster that is already upon us, woven into the fabric of everyday life. The content of the disaster is unimportant. Its

53 No direction home is also the title of Martin Scorsese’s film about Dylan who says at the start of the film: “I had ambition to set out like an odyssey. So I set out to find this home that I left a while back. I couldn’t remember exactly where it was but I was on my way there… and I encountered what I encountered on the way… was how I envisioned it all… I didn’t really have any ambition at all. But I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be… So I’m on my way home.”

105 particulars are annulled by its plurality of possible agents and times, here and to come. What registers is its magnitude. In its most compelling and characteristic incarnations, the now unspecified enemy is infinite. Infinitely small, or infinitely large: viral or environmental” (Massumi, 1993, p11).

From viral contagion, to terrorism to climate change…we feel imminent loss, fear and anxiety as well as indifference, meaninglessness, paralysis and fear. The pervasive fear finds expression in many contemporary popular movies such as Independence Day, Contagion, the Impossible, Towering Inferno, Perfect Storm, and Earthquake. Curiously The Towering Inferno preceded 9/11, The Perfect Storm preceded the New York super storm, and Contagion, the 2014-15 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, thus giving rise to some interesting and perhaps unanswerable questions concerning the narratives we create and the ways we imagine our future.

Independence day The Towering inferno Contagion 20th century Fox 1996 20th Century Fox/ Warner Bros, 2007 (fair use) Warner Bros, 1974 (fair use) (fair use)

Neo Rauch’s 2001 painting Uhrenvergleich, completed before 9/11, combines the image of a burning high-rise building with faceless clocks. Of this painting, the curator Hans Werner Schmidt, says, “I’m not claiming that Rauch is telepathic” “Lurking danger perfects itself behind the veil of everyday life” and Rauch himself says “I inhale the world around me; it flows into the brush and appears transformed. (The painter of exception, YouTube video)54

54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAUEkGUnf0Q

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Neo Rauch Uhrenvergleich, 2001 ©Neo Rauch Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig/Berlin and David Zwirner, New York/London.VG Bildkunst Bonn. Photo: Uwe Walter.

The pressing question becomes how we might negotiate the uncertain terrain without exacerbating the problem or lapsing into hopelessness. What new narratives might we find to negotiate our way forward? How might we find a new way home? What does the underlying metaphor of coming and going say about the self and where we now find ourselves?

6.1 Seeking home

The idea of finding oneself cast out or lost, or of having to undertake a quest that leads us far from home and then having to overcome many trials and tribulations and tests in a seeking for home or safety is a narrative we are familiar with in stories and in our dreams. It is metaphor for negotiating the unknowns. One must set out in order to return.

107 When I was very young, my mother read to my siblings and me from “Blackie’s blue picture book.”55 I particularly remember “The babes in the wood” whose parents die, give them to the care of an uncle who then abandons them deep in the forest. They cannot find their way home and perish in the wood. The birds cover them up with leaves.

Hansel and Gretel are to suffer a similar fate but having overheard their parents plan to abandon them, they collect some shiny white stones and leave a trail, which they then follow in the moonlight to find their way home. The next day they are taken out into the forest again and this time they do not have the stones and must use crumbs of bread instead. Unfortunately, those breadcrumbs are eaten by the birds, thus erasing their trail and leaving them lost in the woods. They then come upon a false home made of bread and sugar, and actually owned by a witch, who eats children. Its enticing exterior is there to entrap them. The metaphor of the home that looks like the answer to one’s dreams but is in actuality a death trap is powerful reminder not to be waylaid by mere external appearances of redemption. On the other hand, investigating dangerous unknowns may lead to undreamt of rewards since the children, after slaying the witch, take her jewels and are able to live a life of riches thereafter.

How do we tell safety from danger, enlightenment from false prophet? In a terrain without maps, we must seek for something that tells us we are on the right track, heading in the right direction. The image of finding and following a trail of stones (or breadcrumbs) stands for a constant seeking of those markers that might tell us we are on the right trail. How do we recognize the signs, find those white stones on the forest floor that might lead us home? Indeed, what is the home that we are seeking?

Dreaming of journeys (by car, bus, train or plane) that are filled with frustrations, delays and crazy distractions is common. The narrative often begins as a simple trip but it almost never reaches its destination. We seem to be seeking a generic home, a place of safety or rest, or a goal that is ill defined, that is however frustratingly elusive.

We are left trying to find and read the text of life itself, searching for a subtext, trying to join the dots and make sense of what we have.

55 Blackie’s blue picture book. Blackie and son NY, 1912. I mention it particularly because of the poetic narratives that are unaffected by the later adulterations of these stories by Walt Disney, Little golden books. And others.

108 6.2 The underlying duality of the self

In considering how we might find meaning or a way home, this project has investigated the nature of the self via the metaphor of the house. There seemed always to be an underlying intractable duality. This duality has many facets.

Firstly, there are the dualities of inside/ outside; up/down, heimlich/unheimlich (safe and dangerous) which emerged from considerations during the projects Bringing it all back home and In my mother’s house. An underlying motif that emerged repeatedly was that of mirroring and reflection.

Furthermore, there is the duality between the internal concept of the self that is embodied in the house metaphor and the way the house we live in mirrors internal realities. The house itself can be seen as embodying the duality between venturing forth and abiding safely within. At a more metaphoric level this can be seen as an ongoing going out and coming in: a constant taking in and giving out. The self is in a constant flux between understanding and expression, between reflection and projection, like slow breathing at a cosmic level.

This underlying duality, characterized by an ongoing movement between, leads us to the sites of interface between inside and outside. Doors and windows, and places of comings and goings such as the hallway, became the site of investigation for my final project. Here we leave, venture forth and seek to return.

6.3 In my daughter’s house

The In my daughter’s house project, developed from the considerations of the In my mother’s house project. The idea of looking backwards in time to my own childhood invited a looking forwards to my daughter’s childhood and a consideration of the relationship between the past and the present. In this work the mother/daughter relationship is considered from the perspective of being a mother as well as daughter. It attempts to relate one viewpoint to the other and examines the space between the subjective and the objective view.

The major motifs (on 2 separate but overlaying canvases) are of looking into and out of a child’s bedroom: inside looking out and outside looking in.

109 In my daughter’s house explores ideas of interiority and exteriority; of looking at oneself and of being looked at by others; of the interweaving of persona and psyche as well as of mothering and being mother.

Layers of painted and transferred images are combined with a third modality of a projected image, on a silk overlay. The layers, the light and shadow, the transparency and the patterning, produce an ethereal effect of looking through veils or layers. We are simultaneously viewing one space and another, or choosing to focus on one layer or the other.

Catherine Kennedy In my daughter’s house (detail). Scheffer gallery install, 2013 Acrylic and photo-transfer on unstretched canvas, silk, dye, projection, found object (door handle)

There are many ways of looking at things and the view will differ depending on our perspective. We may assess the past differently from the viewpoint of the present and we may gain insight into our own situation by viewing it from the perspective of another.

This piece considers the importance of viewpoint: the subjective and the objective, as well as looking forwards and backwards in time, encapsulated by the imagery of simultaneously viewing inside and outside at the site of interface, the bedroom/balcony door.

110 6.4 No direction home

The final project No direction home/just passing through considers the house’s sites of interface: the boundaries that separate one space or reality from another, the exits and entrances and the sites of transition between one place and another.

Walls, fences and boundaries delineate sites of interface between the house’s interior and exterior. They may be fixed or open. They may be keeping out or keeping in.

Do ho Suh’s Seoul Home is a transparent house, where the walls are a permeable membrane and the interior is visible to the exterior, whereas Rachel Whiteread’s House is opaque, solid, its interior is impenetrable, inaccessible even to the house’s owner.

Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home/Beijing Home Rachel Whiteread Ghost, 1990 2002-2012 Plaster on steel frame 106x140x125 inches Silk, stainless steel 1,457 x 717 x 391 cm

© Do Ho Suh, Courtesy of the Artist © Rachel Whiteread; Courtesy of the artist, and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Luhring Augustine, New York New York and Hong Kong . Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, and Gagosian Gallery.

Walls form a boundary, a line of demarcation and thus talk about separation: one from another, but also of right from wrong, or of taking sides. Walls primarily provide protection and safety but they can also limit and confine and thus can speak of the dichotomy between freedom and imprisonment. In the home, walls define the boundary between the secret and the visible, the private and the public. A break or rupture of this boundary, such as occurs in burglary, results in feelings of being raped, of having one’s privacy violated and also in an increased fear of the outside and of others (Korosec Serfaty, 1985, pp 76-79). The essential nature of walls is of division or separation, even if it is mainly symbolic: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ Psychologically speaking, an individual’s mental health and wellbeing is dependent upon these boundaries.

111 Doors and windows provide portals between inside and outside. “To go through a door is to pass from one place to another and therefore from one state of mind to another” (Marc, 1977, p24). Here energy, light and movement come and go. Doors and windows represent sites of communication between the private self and the outside world and define what we let in and keep out. Doorways, gateways and windows may be open or shut, locked or just closed. They may be grand or humble; we may catch a glimpse of light or it may be dark on the other side

Windows let us see out and others see in but primarily our gaze is from inside to outside. Windows let light into the interior; they open up the space, and bring in the view. Doorways allow coming and going, hiding and revealing, opening and closing. As Eliade points out (in Korosec-Serfaty, 1985, p 72) that doorways are also symbolic of openings to other worlds and other realities. Doors join heaven and earth, as well as the past and the future. The magical doorway, found in stories (such as The lion the witch and the wardrobe, Alice in wonderland) is a portal between everyday and magical realities. Doors exhibit a potentiality. Doors offer an opportunity, while at the same time hiding unknowns. We might yet be careful at which door we knock, as any child familiar with fairy-tales knows.56

In any case on either side of the door are two different realities: inside or outside: this room and that, known and unknown.

Just Looking essentially examines the question of discriminating between one door and another. What are we looking for? Are we half-hearted or committed in that search? The motifs of many keys and many doors looks at the question of the doors we might open, the choices we might make and the paths we might take.

56 Is there one of us who hasn’t in his memories a Bluebeard chamber that should not have been opened, even halfway? Bachelard (1969, p224)

112

Catherine Kennedy Just looking, 2015. Acrylic, photo-transfer and gold leaf on unstretched canvas.

Just looking (detail) Just looking (detail)

6.5 The hallway

Hallways and porticos symbolically speak of the act of moving between. Here we have not just the potentiality but also the act of going in and coming out (coming in /going out). Within the house, the hallway is that place from which we exit and through which

113 we enter. The hallway is not a space or destination in itself, nor is it an inhabited or occupied space. It is a place of transit: a place of movement, not of rest. It is a metaphor of change. We start at one point and arrive at another.

In speaking of the hallway metaphor, it is useful to consider Marc Auge’s concept of a ‘non–space’. Auge (1995) describes places of ‘super-modernity’ where we increasingly spend our time: places such as airports, railway stations, shopping centres, freeways as places of transit, commerce and leisure, as places shared by many but experienced largely in solitude. They are places where people continually pass through but do not settle. They are in-between spaces. There is a strange paradox around identity in these spaces. On the one hand our identity must be verified in order to take part in the space (we need a licence, credit card or ticket) while on the other our individual identity is, to all intents and purposes, erased. Essentially they are places in which we exist, together but alone, moving on our individual journey. While increasing amounts of time are spent within these spaces they are essentially ‘non-space’ since our essential purpose in entering them is not to be in them but to transition from one place/space to another. Such places typify contemporary existence. Not only are we in continual movement, but it is also in these spaces that anonymity can provide a cover for terror and fear.

The hallway represents a transit space. The hallway invites us to step over a threshold into a passageway that leads from one space to another. By entering that front door, we are entering a liminal space. In many traditional Australian houses, (certainly the one I grew up in and the one I now live in), the hallway is the space that you first enter after opening the front door and it is thus the start of the journey into the interior. It is also the space approaching the front door, through which one exits the interior and enters the world. One is constantly passing through the hallway but rarely stopping there. We greet and fare well; we prepare to move out into the world and we return and rest.

114

Hallway of the author’s childhood home Hallway (Metropolitan Rd, Enmore)

Like Alice's trip down the rabbit hole, or Psyche's journey to the underworld, the hallway can lead to explorations of the dark and irrational as we move from persona, identity, and self within social role and relationship to our private self, our veiled motives, compelling drives, motivating fears and underlying narratives. And, like the hero’s journey, the hallway can lead us away from the safety of the private world and the known, out into the world of experience, learning and danger. We set off from here on a journey of discovery.

The hallway, like the passage or the corridor, can also symbolize a place of major transformation. The image of the hallway or corridor is often used to express ideas about the major transitions of birth and death: our ultimate coming in and going out. Birth and death are, in turn, sometimes used as metaphors of psychic transformation. We speak of the birth of ideas, of being reborn or of reaching a dead end. The death card in the tarot pack is said to represent not just actual death, but an ending and a beginning more generally and, as such, represents a major change in life; a loss followed by renewal, a letting go of something that allows us to move forward. It represents a transformation of our lives from one condition to another. The hallway as a passageway, constantly traversed, forward and back can symbolise a kind of reversing duality as in from birth to life and life to death.

115

Passageways (author’s own photos) Blue Mountains and India. (Orchha)

In considering the house as a metaphor for the self, the duality we wish to traverse is not only between our private interior world and the world of the other but also between understanding and expression. Our understanding of the world comes from a constantly changing duality between acting out on the world and contemplating upon it. In this way the hallway might be seen as a site of investigation into the duality between two opposite states: reflection and projection, understanding and expression, dreaming and acting. The image of the hallway can thus talk about traversing a psychic and experiential space of being.

This ‘coming in and going out’ might also include different modes of being and thinking such as that of directing and allowing; of inspiration and analysis; of creating and planning. These fundamentally different but equally important processes have been distinguished in the field of neuro-aesthetics as top down versus bottom up processes57 but they might as easily be described as inward and outward. We can plan, direct and analyse or we can allow in, be open to new thoughts and ideas, daydream and free associate. We need to be able to move between the two: reflect on our actions and act on our reflections. In so doing we create or construct our reality.

The hallway potentially offers the possibility of achieving a balance between venturing forth and abiding safely within and of achieving understanding through the duality of acting out on the world and contemplating upon it. The hallway embodies the ultimate

57 I first encountered the concept of top down and bottom up systems in a lecture by M.A. Greenstein. It is however an emerging area of study in neuro-science and neuro-aesthetics. The practical application of these 2 systems of thought to creativity is entertainingly described by John Cleese in the YouTube video on the importance of play www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qby0ed4aVpo

116 duality of the house itself. It is an image that provides a site of investigation into the transition between reflecting upon our world and of projecting ourselves onto the world and of how we might negotiate this terrain.

6.6 The hallway project: Just passing through

Evoking the aesthetics of side-show alley and the theatre, the work in the project No direction home/just passing through is neither painting nor installation, (though it may appear from time to time as either or both) but an alternative scenario or situation; a situation58 that causes us to constantly question what is real and what is not. Painted image joins with photographic transfer, real objects combine with painted images and metaphor collides with representation. What emerges is a crack in the status quo, a moment of simultaneously experiencing external experience and internal psychic reality, a glimpse of some of the questions we need to answer but are not asking.

The hallway itself exerts a profound sense of embodiment on the audience. On entering the life-size hallway, the audience becomes part of the space: enfolded, involved, and implicated.

Hallway install, Just passing through, Blackbox, UNSW Art and Design, September 2015

58 The English artist Sarah Lucas uses the term situation in relation to her work, (Lucas, 2012) because it emphasizes a relationship between things rather than it presents a completed object or an overall construct that is more fixed.

117

Schneider, in his Kellar Haus UR, asks us to experience reality as dark, claustrophobic, terrifyingly unknown. Nelson in Coral Reef asks us to experience reality as dark, deviant and threatening. The hallway, on the other hand, asks the audience to experience reality as ‘other’. ‘Other’ than the way we normally experience reality, other than we might expect it to be, other than fixed or predictable.

At the end of the hallway are two identical arched doorways, behind which are two arched mirrors. Thus one gradually (or suddenly) becomes aware of one’s own reflection as one approaches the doorways. This arrangement also functions as an illusion that implies the ending is a mirror rather than an actual entry/exit. The forced perspective of the hallway gives the illusion of direction: narrowing as we enter, expanding as we leave but the hallway is ultimately directionless as it has openings at both ends. We can go one way and then the other: alternately in and out, this way and that.

Hallway install, Just passing through, Blackbox, UNSW Art and Design, September 2015

The layers of silk are like veils, translucent but indistinct, creating a sense of shifting or uncertain space.

118 ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ 59

The hallway with its theatrical aspect invites us to enter, partake, and experience: perhaps to see or create other possibilities. It invites us to consider that reality itself might be a construct. In the same way that ‘seeing’ occurs more in the brain than in the eyes, (i.e. the brain constructs the image from the received input) so, it might be argued, is experienced reality constructed from incoming and learned information.

The transparent silk is echoed in Passing through: a house as a dual or mirror image, half lit, ghostly and blowing in the breeze.

Catherine Kennedy Passing through. Blackbox, UNSW Art and Design, September 2015 Silk, balsawood, cotton, lighting, fan, sound.

59 1 Corinthians 13, 12. (King James) or in the International standard version ‘Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.’

119 Cooper Marcus (1985) quotes from tales of the Hassidim:

A tourist from America paid a visit to a renowned Polish rabbi Hofetz Chaim. He was astonished to see the rabbi’s home was only a simple room filled with books, plus a table and a bench. “Rabbi”, asked the tourist, “where is your furniture?” “Where is yours?” replied Hofetz Chaim. Mine?” asked the puzzled American. “But I’m only passing through“ “So am I”, said the rabbi (p251)

Passing through the arched doorways that function as a threshold, we do not enter a home, a protective space, but somewhere open, spacious and dark. Objects are floating, not anchored to the ground. These objects themselves seem to be sites of movement or transition.

Catherine Kennedy, Passing through, Pod and Weatherhouse (Blackbox install 2015)

These pieces have movement, light and sound. Pod is slowly turning, capturing the viewer in a vertiginous, spiralling floor pattern whilst emitting the insistent repetitive sound of cicadas. Weatherhouse has a focussed external light and a moving circular platform so that the figures are continually moving out of the house into the light and back inside the dark of the house in an ongoing, eternal circle, accompanied by the sound of haunting, melancholy waltz music. The slight overlap of the sounds of the

120 waltz and the cicadas within the large dark void-like space establishes an otherworldly atmosphere that echoes within the psyche of the audience.

Pod, 2015 (cane, sticks, paint, cicadas, Weatherhouse, 2015 (found doll house, wood, LED lighting, doll, cloth, iPod, speaker, mirror-ball motor, clock, paint, photo-transfer ,wallpaper, wires small figurines, LED light, iPod, speaker, wires)

Passing through installation view. Blackbox, 2015

121 Robert Gober (in Gholsen, 1989) has drawn attention to the way familiar household objects can be used to talk about transitional states. The sink, for example, may be seen as moving from dirty to clean.60

Robert Gober Robert Gober Robert Gober Untitled, 1999-2000 Untitled, 1986 Untitled, 2005-2006 Plaster, beeswax, human hair, Wood, cotton, wool, down, enamel paint Stoneware, beeswax, cotton cotton, leather, aluminium 36 ½ x 43 x 76 3/8 inches leather, aluminium pull tabs, pull tabs, enamel paint human hair, cast lead crystal, 50 ¾ x 47 x 26 ¼ inches aluminium-leaf, oil enamel and acrylic paint 28 ¾ x 21 x 29 ½ inches

© Robert Gober, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Likewise, the bed is the site of transition from conscious to unconscious (and vice versa); the chair between movement and rest, acting and being still; the table between hunger and satisfaction; the lamp between light and darkness, illumination and obscurity and the mirror the real and the reflected. (Ourselves as we think we are and ourselves as others see us). We also speak of ‘putting something to bed’, of ‘turning the tables’ or of ‘shining a light on something.’ These objects can thus function as metaphors for various psychological transitions. The furniture motif is echoed in the paintings e.g. the beds in Homeland, the pantry in Cupboard love.

The paintings are likewise “situational” and were created in concert with the sculptural pieces. With their tent-like, sideshow alley aesthetic, they similarly evoke the notion of constructed reality implied in the hallway piece. Collectively they consider notions of

60 “For the most part, the objects I choose are almost all emblems of transition; objects that you complete with your body, and they’re objects that, in one way or another, transform you. Like the sink, from dirty to clean; the beds, from conscious to unconscious; rational thought to dreaming; the doors transform you in the sense that you were speaking of, moving from one space through another” Robert Gober speaking to Craig Gholson in Gholson (1989)

122 self and home through the combined lens of relationship and transition. The inclusion of objects and photographic transfer plays with the dichotomy of reality and illusion. The animation with light and movement implies a fairground setting and a situation that is not fixed but changeable.

The audience is invited to consider these situations and their relationships, symbolic and personal, and to create their own narratives.

Catherine Kennedy No direction home (detail), 2015 Acrylic and photo-transfer on unstretched canvas, found doll house, LED strip lighting, electrical box, wires, woollen shawl, canvas, human hair, acrylic hair, fox fur and lace

No direction home (detail)

123 ‘Not at home’ is a personal reflection on the notion of being ‘at home’/ ‘not at home’ with oneself. It relates to dreams of being in the wrong house and a sense of discomfort in relation to oneself and the world at large. It exhibits a profound sense of unease in its exploration of the idea of being homeless in a psychological/emotional or spiritual sense.

Catherine Kennedy Not at home, 2014. Acrylic, photo-transfer and stencil on unstretched canvas, LED lights

Catherine Kennedy Cupboard love, 2015. Acrylic, photo-transfer and stitching on canvas, wood, rubber teats, drinking glasses, plaster, glue.

124 Cupboard love plays with ideas of nurturing, mothering, the distribution of resources and of all that is stored or hidden.

Homeland considers a wider sense of home or belonging and comes up with an ongoing movement between acquisition and loss; accumulation and dispersion; victim and perpetrator. As the dual hexagrams in the I Ching of Dispersion/dissolution (No. 59 Huan) and Gathering Together/accumulation (No. 45 Tsui) show, accumulation leads to dispersion, and dispersion to accumulation. The reference to the Yeats’ poem, where “things fall apart the centre cannot hold”61, implies the way in which master narratives can no longer hold us. Like the hallway’s notion of coming and going, life exhibits an ongoing state of flux.

Catherine Kennedy, Homeland, 2015. Acrylic, photo-transfer, stencil and gold leaf on unstretched canvas

61 WB Yeats “The Second Coming”

125 References

Auge, Marc. Non-places. An introduction to the anthropology of supermodernity. Translated John Howe. Verso, London, New York, 1995

Bachelard, G. The poetics of space. Translated Maria Jolas. Beacon paperback, 1969.

Cooper Marcus, Clare. House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home. Conari Press. Berkeley California, 1995.

Elliot, Anthony. Reinvention. Routledge, 2013

Gholson, C. Artists in conversation: Robert Gober. BOMB quarterly, 29. Fall 1989

Korosec-Serfaty, P. Experience and use of the dwelling in Altman, I and Werner, C.M. (Eds) Home Environments. Plenum Press, New York, 1985.

Lucas, Sarah. Maybe I’m just an old hippie. Guardian interview. November 20, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuvZNVwhmY

Marc, Oliver. (Tr Jessie Wood) The psychology of the house. Thames and Hudson. London, 1977

The painter of exception Neo Rauch/Arts 21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAUEkGUnf0Q

126 Conclusion

This research grew out of the initial work Bringing it all back home, which sought to uncover the house of childhood and memory. Dreams involving houses and the writing of Gaston Bachelard combined with an interest in psychology, philosophy and metaphysics, led me towards seeing the house metaphor as a way of looking at the essential nature of the self and the relationship of the self to ways of knowing and believing.

The childhood home is where the psyche is incubated and as such is deeply etched into our notions and experience of self. The play between genetics and early experience forms the underlying plan that becomes the foundation of the adult house of self. These foundations or floor plans determine the whole structure, although they are not themselves necessarily visible.

The building of the adult house of self is constrained not only by this early patterning but also by the templates presented by education, culture, society and interactions with the peer group, or cultural cohort within which we find ourselves. Reacting against these influences speaks as loudly as does directly copying them. Although we may believe that we are clearly and freely choosing how we build our adult house of self, our choices are probably more constrained than we realize. We build our persona and identity in adolescence and early adulthood and we (potentially) continue building and renovating the house of self throughout our adult life. The In my mother’s house project explored ideas around the building/rebuilding of the house of self.

A faulty construction of the house of self might need to be rebuilt or at least substantially renovated at some later stage. Studies in neuroplasticity have shown that while changing the house of self is possible, it is not easily done, since the need to change has to be clearly understood and keenly felt in order to effect change by consciously forming new pathways.

It would appear that gaining insight into our underlying imprinting, and into the patterning of wider socio cultural forces, is a necessary first step. But in order to identify underlying patterns, it is necessary to develop some insight into our behaviour

127 and emotions, some degree of objectivity in our observation of self while at the same time acknowledging and giving room to the subjectivity of self. Various forms of psychoanalysis or personal observation and reflection might be employed in an attempt to uncover, unmask, and gain insight into underlying emotions and behaviours, but it is my contention that incorporating dream imagery, information from the unconscious mind, and emotional observation are an important part of this process. In other words, we need to process intuitive and emotional input, along with our conscious thoughts.

In addition, life itself involves a feedback loop that can lead to self-knowledge. In the fullness of life experience, we will find ourselves in one position and then another: parent and child, teacher and pupil, winner and loser, victor and vanquished, victim and perpetrator. There is a kind of ‘karmic feedback loop’ that is inbuilt. In my daughter’s house explored the perspective gained by understanding different viewpoints such as the past and the present, the subjective and objective. A wider or group version of this learning process/ feedback loop was explored in Homeland.

However, it is not only an investigation of the past or an uncovering of underlying patterns that is important, it is also a question of opening up to the present: being aware enough to process incoming information openly, without bias, and not only within the framework of familiar or master narratives and unexamined impulses. It is important to allow ourselves to ‘see’ rather than to only ‘look’ with purpose; to reflect and be open to input as well as to analyse.

Scientific method, based on testing a hypothesis, in a way confines the researcher to finding out something that was already expected or predicted, (or alternatively, to proving that something which was expected, is not so.) Statistical analysis relies on the formation of categories of identified data, of making groupings of tested or ‘looked for’ qualities. It defines what occurs ‘most often’; it locates averages and means; and groups together things that are similar and things that are different, but rarely and only serendipitously comes up with something entirely new.

There are some innovative analyses that seek to uncover unlooked-for relationships between variables/contributing factors. Nevertheless, it has to be said, that the ‘unknown unknowns’ are very difficult to identify via objective and analytical thought.

128 We put too much emphasis on the analytical point of view, creating linear narratives that ignore whole sections/ layers of reality. We miss a more holistic understanding that might be gained by looking for new associations between things, layers and levels.

The house metaphor, incorporating its duality of inside and outside; of venturing forth and abiding safely within; of prospect and refuge; of coming in and going out, of setting out and returning; provides a way of meditating on complex issues by visualizing a self that knows and understands through alternately reflecting inwardly and projecting outwardly: a self that reflects on actions and acts on reflections.

All dualities, (such as up and down, inside and out, reflection and projection) are characterized by their polarities: polarities that we must somehow synthesise or draw closer together. My artistic process is focused on a synthesis. My process draws images from the conscious and unconscious; from the rational and from deep-seated emotions; from the past and from the present; from the culture as well as from the imagination. In this way narratives are allowed to form via the associations between rather than by imposing a linear narrative on things from above.

We’re each looking for the direction home, our symbolic Promised Land. It’s commonly said that it’s all about the journey and not the destination but what does this really mean? If we are just passing through; if we fully understand the fact that life itself is marked by a coming in and a going out and the house of self is not a fixed entity, then we exist symbolically in the house’s hallway. The hallway is a transit space into which we come and from which we depart. There is no refuge to which we can retire or a structure that is secure and permanent. This house of self marks a place between one point and another. Within it we act and reflect, advance and withdraw.

129