Sunday, April 17, 2011

Laura's statement

I would not call what I create "art" just as any therapist would not call their client notes a "novel".  What I do is not firstly for the enjoyment of others, but instead a means to deal with and sort out the multitude of neuroses with which I struggle internally.  I often find that expression through words either falls short of what I am trying to convey or possibly that the thoughts I am trying to convey are too complex, temporally, spatially, and dimensionally, that the linear structure of a sentence is incapable of carrying them across to an audience or even to myself.  When I write and try to make sense, my sentences jump or ramble.  I would not consider myself a person with artistic talent, but I would consider myself a person who has an intense drive to create and express what I have in me.  When I create, I almost never enter into a project with an idea in mind.  I prefer to dive in head first and hope that the water materializes beneath me before I hit the bottom. The water in this clichéd metaphor would be the primitive, guttural reaction, the fight or flight response, pure sympathetic nervous system.  It is the truest form of self-expression, because there is no forethought.  There is just you and whatever is inside of you.  It is honest.  You have no time in which to concoct a lie. It is not usually pretty or pleasurable to unearth.  It is not usually something with which I am completely comfortable sharing.  But I've tried therapy, that doesn't work.  I've tried creating, that works.