Talking a lot about my relationship with my dad in therapy as well as simultaneously reading about Louise Burgeois and her complicated relationship with her father, whom she admired and hated at the same time. In therapy I’m discovering my feelings are nore focused around feeling abandoned, guilty and responsible at the same time. When my parents divorced, I was 10, I witnessed my dad crying multiple times and was burdened with the feeling that I had to take care of him and his feelings at the age that I had no idea what that meant. At the same time my stepdad became a new person in my life, by moving in with my mum and dad. I remember that time in my life being really difficult, crying a lot in the bathtub, fighting with my stepdad and being scared of him, when he shouted in a very intense voice(he was trained as an actor). I got on with it, shutting down most of the time and keeping all my feelings inside, unable to express them. My dad would make me feel sad and guilty and responsible for him. Even now, I find it really hard to know what I’m feeling when he says something hurtful. I want to be able to say: “Dad, you’re making me sad/angry/upset when you’re saying these things, is that your intention? Are you sure you should be saying things like that to your daughter?” but I feel paralysed by not being sure what I’m feeling and it takes me a really long time to understand/get in touch with these feeelings and even then I’m still not sure if talking to my dad about them makes any sense. I want to express those feelings but I also want to protect him. I feel lost and allover the place, like threads of something stitched together or embroidered incorrectly, with all the thread strands hanging off irregularly. Like the fabric works of Abakanowicz I saw at Tate Modern in 2023 (“I am interested in the emotion and waving of the woven surfaces … constructing an environment from my forms”) or Louise Bourgeois “The Good Mother” from 2003 (For her, making art was an integral part of her psyche: “I need to make things.” She once said. “I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.”). And then I saw these amazing embroidered paintings at THE LONG NOW by Carolina Mazzolari, whose practice “explores psychological states through abstraction, often drawing on psychoanalysis, intuition, cognition and emotional development” and how her Lines and emotional Fields pieces engage “Jungian psychology(that aims to balance the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind) to render inner experience as a spatial phenomenon” at Saatchi and Lily Le Bont cut up canvases as well as Larissa Esvelt’s “The Bath” in STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS at SAATCHI GALLERY and I am wondering how the threads could be an interesting way to “reclaiming rupture as renewal”
So as a final conclusion to these emotional conversations I am having with myself, to my dreams and to the exhibitions I have recently seen, I am thinking of embarking on a research journey involving painting on linen canvas and stitching through that canvas after I have finished painting. I want to start by reproducing the MOTHERCORE 01 painting on the fridge door, which is the central piece of my MOTHERCORE collage. I have prepped the canvas and the frame and will try to work on the painting this week. Also debating not only stitching through but putting a light behind and seing if it will be visible through the holes in the canvas. Or maybe making extra holes, like bullets, like every time something says something hurtful to me?