The subconscious mind is a data-bank for everything, which is not in your conscious mind. It stores your beliefs, your previous experience, your memories, your skills. Everything that you have seen, done or thought is also there. It is also your guidance system.
The Surrealists borrowed many of the same techniques to stimulate their writing and art, with the belief that the creativity that came from deep within a person’s subconscious could be more powerful and authentic than any product of conscious thought.
Influenced by the writings of psychologist Sigmund Freud, the literary, intellectual, and artistic movement called Surrealism sought a revolution against the constraints of the rational mind; and by extension, the rules of a society they saw as oppressive. Freud and other psychoanalysts used a variety of techniques to bring to the surface the subconscious thoughts of their patients. The Surrealists borrowed many of the same techniques to stimulate their writing and art, with the belief that the creativity that came from deep within a person’s subconscious could be more powerful and authentic than any product of conscious thought.
MOMA
My work stems from automatic drawing, a succession of automatism developed by the Surrealists. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud used free association and automatic drawing to explore the unconscious mind of his patients. Enhancing prints and drawings of spontaneous action through digital manipulation, my work is the result of mirrored imagery and sophisticated systems of lines and patterns, for this I was driven by decalcomania, a technique used by many artists and commonly associated with the Surrealists in which paint is pressed between two pieces of paper, hence mirroring the image. My imagery includes themes of symbolism, geometry, pattern and illusion. Having the original automatic drawing derived from the subconscious, means the imagery is puzzling, thus inducing introspection for the viewer as their optical perception reveals what is there, a self-reflecting exercise that I want my art to facilitate. I’m interested in themes of order, systems and chance.
