I attended a lecture this week by Laura E. Perez and Queen Brooks on spirituality in artwork. They specifically addressed that spirituality didn’t have to mean God or Spirit (with a capital s.) Instead, they talked about spirituality as an expression of the disembodied, and that could mean a god, a spirit, Gods, Spirits, or even the spirit of self as seen through human interaction, emotion, and desire. Love is spiritual. Sex is spiritual. Pain is spiritual. Everything I go through on a daily basis is linked to my spiritual experience as a human being. I really related to this, and it helped me to embrace the idea of spirituality in my artwork even though I would never previously have called myself spiritual. I spend so much time trying to express feelings through both the words and imagery in my artwork. What about this isn’t spiritual?
Additionally, Queen Brooks showed us this one piece that she saw as a self-portrait. She told us a story about how this one woman walked up to the piece, spent so much time with it, and then pulled away crying, claiming that her husband just had to purchase the piece because she related to it so much. Queen was surprised because she put all of her feelings into this work, and yet someone else found herself in it. This is what I want to happen with my art.
All of my work this year has been a physical representation of what I’m thinking while creating the pieces. They are excessive, non-narrative, hard to follow, and 100% about me. I’ve tried to display them in an aesthetically appealing manner so that viewers are first pulled in by the visual content and then as they start to break apart both the words and visuals they become interested in the emotional concepts. It’s not important to me that the viewers know exactly what’s I was thinking when I put down the symbols, objects, words, and colors. Instead, I hope that some of the ideas the viewer can divulge and relate to, comparing it to their own lives.
I’m also engrossed specifically in the ways a person makes themselves vulnerable by producing artwork about all their thoughts with no editing. I write down something that I wouldn’t even tell my best friend, but then I paint over it, only allowing some of the words to show through. In this manner, my struggle to become accessible, my reluctance, my vulnerability is shown. This process is the exact process that can happen when a viewer relates so strongly to a piece that he or she allows the work and concepts to engulf him or her and share his or her spirituality. The person allows his or her walls to be broken down and shows in a physical way the ways in which the art touched their disembodied soul.