Anna McDowell©

Starting from an intuitively gathered amalgam of found photographic imagery and text, this recent body of work explores how art-making is grounded in our most primal relationship to the mother, informed by the psychoanalytic writing of Bracha L. Ettinger. Ettinger believes that when we engage in artistic activity, we are unconsciously in communication with, as well as longing for, the early space of our mother’s womb. And in that space, we convened as precognitive beings with the resonances and rhythms of the mother’s body, experienced as an unknown (yet known) ‘other’. I have sought to capture traces of this primordial connection, intuitively searched for and uncovered in the process of, as Ettinger terms it, ‘artworking’. The works are presented as a series of ephemeral, poetic investigations; remains, ghostly indexes of thoughts and observations in process. Creating prints using photolithography and ultra-transparent ink or harnessing white on white embroidery, fragments of photographic imagery and text are gently transformed. This subtle aesthetic reflects the notion that the artwork stands as a trace of deeply buried unconscious material, finding form in, through and between artist and viewer alike.

‘The place of art is for me … more than a place … rather a space, that allows for certain occasions of occurrence and encounter’ Bracha L. Ettinger, Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma

Bracha L. Ettinger’s psychoanalytic writing has puzzled and guided me in equal measure through the development of this body of work. In the above piece titled Of Beauty’s Palpitations I have extracted a fragment of text from Ettinger’s essay Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma and transposed it on to fabric using hand-embroidery. This text(ile) object function as an homage to Ettinger’s theoretical writing which offers an alternative to the phallocentric, Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic paradigm, locating an inherent link between subjectivity, creativity and the feminine. This work reflects on the felt experience of engaging with theoretical language via the process of art-making, a meditation on how these interconnected spheres inform and shape one another. This work also considers the relationship between craft and theory, text and textiles, taking into account the historical privileging of language (the seen, the known) over material (the felt, the intuited).