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the unthinkable thought

Polly Morgan

I wouldn't have ordinarially thought to pair artists Polly Morgan & Kate MccGwire even though they work primarily in the 'taxidermy' genre. Polly's recent unsettlingly beautiful serpentine series really snagged me though, when I came across them while down the research rabbit hole for my new collection 'Darkling, I Listen', & I began to think of Kate's feathered 'serpents' that I had always meant to write about here. There is a palpable kinship between these works; the sinuous shapes of snakeskin and feather, abstracted from life and yet still retaining 'life,' a somber yet beautiful evidencing of what is left behind and what has gone away. Both works are bodily & visceral and poetic in their quiet non-linear narratives....& yet, still born from death. (I do believe that Kate's feathers are collected but still see this as a kind of death from the body.) I love synchronicity like this.

As I work on this collection, mostly inspired by Jung's ideas on 'inner alchemy' & the process of individuation and how it symbolically relates to ancient alchemical processes, I've been thinking a lot of my own looping internal landscape. I think of the darkness I carry inside me; how I often seem to repeat myself, the way I obsess over insignificant moments or 'signs', the way I have circling thoughts, & my nearly life long desire for some of this static to be lifted. I think of the shapes of my thoughts and the shapes of these works, and how they relate to the snake both literally ( as in Polly's work) and visually ( as in how Kate coils her feathered shapes); of the snake as an ancient symbol, eating its own tail, the Ouroboros. I think of the threaded philosophy in 'True Detective', the Cosmic Horror Lovecraft imbued into his mythos, which seems to be running rampant in our collective unconscious evidenced by how many people seem to have been deeply struck by Rustin Cohle's philosophy on life: "Time Is A Flat Circle;" Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' which is likened to the alchemical Ouroboros, the eternal return. ( see, a lot of (perhaps useless) circular thinking is going on over here during this full moon)  

I'm unsure as to whether or not any of these thoughts were in the minds of these two artists or if I was in a different season in my life, if I would still view them with this strange dark lens. Whatever the reason is, it feels like little bolts of lightning to see them in this frame of thought. I live for these moments of connection.

Polly Morgan:

Polly Morgan

Polly Morgan

Polly Morgan

Kate MccGwire
Kate McGwire

Kate McGwire

Kate McGwire

Kate McGwire

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