to pierce a crow’s eye

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Elaine Fisher

Orkney Crow (2018)

I have been drying and peeling fruit stones. I have photographed an avocado boat. I have dipped into the water with the oar of a Canadian Canoe and touched Lily, Lotus, searching for the rhizome below. I found what I didn’t know I was seeking in the bulbous lignotuber of the Arbutus which here is a protected Oak, a place where native objects have been carefully buried (for future use?)

Crow looms over the process, casting its eye. Crow is Raven, the First Nation Trickster, seemingly stupid, irrational and untrustworthy, yet providing the necessary agitation that enables access to an ancient store of knowledge.

The Trickster abounds in contemporary politics because there is much to learn, much that we have lost in our contemporary experience. The Trickster is not the way but resonates at our deepest level and causes us to act on our primitive knowing so that a way forward can be found. The Trickster points to all that is wrong, delighting in it so that we can ignore it no longer; dancing naked on our collective wounds, defecating on our public monuments. Turning a blind eye to the Trickster enables our wounds, our monumental disasters to dig in, deeper. Confronting Him with logic merely feeds the frenzy. We need to watch and learn from His mistakes, for in His doing is the key to Her undoing.

Crow provides access to the deep and a way out again, pecking over the old dark bones so that they can re-emerge gleaming from the dark to light our way.

(“to pierce a crow’s eye” is a Roman saying for something thought impossible to do ref. Mayberry and Kramer eds. 2007 The Cryptopedia: A dictionary of the weird, strange and downright bizarre)

neurosis (over)looked(over)

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Elaine Fisher

ness -ness nest nestle net (2018) or neurosis (over)looked(over) (retitled 2018)

An article in which I consider my own artistic practice as metaphor for Jung’s theory and process of individuation; aiming towards wholeness through a connection of apparently opposing forces.

Until recently I have separated out my self from the place of artistic enquiry. Unconsciously at first and then, in an emerging consciousness, discrediting the appearance of self in order that my work not to be identified as naval-gazing and irrelevant to an audience other than me. But research into Jung’s psychological theory of a collective consciousness has expanded my view as to the relevance (to others) of this undeniably personal enquiry.

To go into the self offers the potential of opening into the deepest and oldest levels of the psyche, to a time before consciousness when myths were created and (re)created, passed on in an oral tradition in order to draw meaning from our shared experiences. To go into the oldest levels of the psyche to a time before the concept of linear time, to a time before differentiation, before we became self and other, offers the potential of wholeness and oneness, a connection between people that emerges through their own myths as they are laid out in parallel.

The beauty of this enquiry is that it simultaneously reaches inwards and outwards, for “when the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image for us to step into” (Eckhart von Hochheim in Ronnberg ed.2010 p6). Stepping into the image prioritizes knowledge that comes from intuition but it does not remain unconscious, rather inuition “precedes thinking” and also “suggests where thinking may go; it is the star which determines the adjustment of the telescope” (June Singer in Downing, C ed. 1994 p387), the lens with which we search for the kernel of the complex, the archetype with parallels across world mythologies.

No longer are self-reflective qualities in my work seen as curiosities, bi-products of more important external investigations. Metaphors that pointed outwards towards Climate Change now also look inwards towards advancing weather systems that might indicate a depression. The word ‘neurotic’ apparently coincidental in a work looking at boundaries and exchange in language and landscape, overlooking internal complexes, emotionally charged ideas that redirect my thinking and behaviour.

In my latest body of work, the field of research was a dream site, experienced whilst on holiday in Valletta, Malta. Encountering material that undoubtedly connected with the ‘inside’ I was unable to project my analysis onto anything other than my self. Each time my research ventured outwards it took a kind of boomerang trajectory, mirroring the journey of my enquiry into the human condition from a study of archaeology towards archaeology-as-metaphor (for depth psychology). The further I travelled from my dream the closer I came back to an understanding of my self.

Downing, C ed. 1994 The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time Shambbala Press p387

Ronnberg ed. 2010 The book of Symbols Taschen p6

Did you meet her? (d’m’t-er)

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Elaine Fisher

click image to play

Did you meet her? (d’m’t-er) is a selective installation from an ongoing body of work, the impulse for which emerged in a search for the Mother Goddess in Valetta, Malta in 2017. The work draws on my own dreams and archetypal encounters, the pre-patriarchal myth of the triple goddess, Demeter, and the psychological concept of a world-soul.

Nau Arts (11-18 May 2018)
unit 2 Crooks Industrial Estate, Cheltenham

from ‘Buddo’ to Brodgar: experiencing neolithic Orkney

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Elaine Fisher

from Buddo to Brodgar: experiencing neolithic Orkney in its own terms – in the transition from linguistic-mythic to material-symbolic culture

“Taking my cue from the ‘Buddo’ assignment, I approached Orkney from a position of un-knowing, purposefully holding back from research. I read just enough to satisfy the logistics of travel. It was no surprise to find that I was at the centre of my Brodgar experience, but I was surprised by the bodily nature of my experience. In the ‘Buddo’ assignment my connections had been linguistically based – in books, held within stories told. At Brodgar, the physical experience of the site seemed to draw all its resonances directly from my body-mind, the memory of my hands forming a basket, my hands reconstructing a pot”

1. the centre: the point of origin, of making, holding the stones together

Brodgar_1

“I connect opposites: two stones to the north, three to the south, two to the east, one to the west. With this basic structure (like starting a basket) I can complete the circle and hold it in my minds eye.”

2. fragments: piecing together the remains of the circle, to take away, relationships intact

Brodgar_2

Photo 24-04-2017

“I photograph two or three stones at a time, from the centre, in rotation, making sure to include the last stone from each group in the next shot so that they can later be pieced together (like fragments of a pot)”

3. embodied: in circular procession, the stones materialising one by one, through bodily proximity, comparing scale and weight

Brodgar_3

“I follow the stones around, starting at the first upright and stopping at each one, seeing how far I, my eye, my camera lens, might travel around its circumference (weave between each upright). We are all doing this, in procession.”

(refs. The transition from linguistic-mythic to material-symbolic culture is an adaption of Merlin Donal’s system of Cognitive phases by Colin Renfrew in Renfrew, Colin (2003) Figuring it out p113 London, Thames and Hudson)

extract from ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY: ASSIGNMENT 2 a presentation comprehending the role that visual culture plays in heritage understanding and interpretation

my minds i:mpulse

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Elaine Fisher

(re)searching ‘Buddo’ as ‘mother goddess’, Hoy Sound, Orkney (with Lucy Gresley)

“what form could there be that would better express the satisfaction of those needs [food, shelter, warmth, safety, children] than this small, carved, fecund female? Unless it were the form of a whole hilly landmass, built-up and carved and shaped into the pregnant body of a woman……so that by walking on the land, you walked on the torso of her divinity, you explored her breasts, her armpits, the space between her thighs, or ran the endless ripple and swell of her back for mile after mile”

(refs. Woodman, Marion (1993) Leaving my father’s house: a journey to conscious femininity; post title inspired by Janet Mullarney’s My minds i (2015) IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland)

Sedimentation: art, archaeology and subjective plurality

Posted on March 10, 2017 by Elaine Fisher

Elaine Fisher and Lucy Gresley ‘Buddo’ (2017) part

what seemed appropriate (successful?) in a collaborative approach was that it was subjective, yes, but there was also a plurality to that subjectivity that wouldn’t quite let ‘Buddo’ settle. Yes we brought ourselves to the process but we also left ourselves. Rather than finding common ground we encountered a kind of sediment, the settlement that occurs as thoughts and feelings aired gently find their own temporary resting place together. A suspension of text over image allowed a view through, between and beyond. The view could have been other and both elements could have been different. This was a muddy response to a muddy assignment.

The very nature of the collaborative process meant that we captured a moment in time, time spent (with the concept of ‘Buddo’) in relation. In this way we encountered ‘Buddo’ as many different people have before us, at a particular point in the trajectory of our understanding of the world. A temptation to edit, to tweak and improve our assignment response, was removed. Hindsight is not an option in this way of working and Hindsights would have retuned ‘Buddo’ to a new suspension, equally but differently uncertain.

a response to ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY: ASSIGNMENT 1 a visual essay, outlining and critically assessing the entanglement of visual culture, in the processes of collection, curation and display

displacement(derivation): art, archaeology and the question of language

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Elaine Fisher

Todays entanglement is a coincidental reading of Cochrane and Russell’s manifesto for a visual archaeology (on my Art and Archaeology module reading list) and George Yule’s ‘the study of language’ (an impulse purchase).

What makes language a uniquely human trait is our ability to refer to past and future time and other locations and to “communicate things and places whose existence we cannot even be sure of”, a trait known as displacement. With this potential for the imaginary, why is it that theoretical concepts in archaeology are seen as being constrained by their linguistic context? How has language become so problematic?

Cochrane and Russell describe the difference between archaeology as a natural science (a logical, process-driven, linear, temporal and evolutionary understanding of the world) and as a humanity (a poetic expression of humans grappling with modern philosophies, paradigms and epistemologies in a world which is rapidly changing but simultaneously constant).

Cochrane and Russell’s poetic archaeology is pitched towards accessible interpretation in an increasingly visual society yet their “archaeological expressionism” includes a whole range of language-rich contexts: imageries, societies, objects, events, articulations and fictions. It is not in an absence of language then but in an opening up of language, at its interface with image, that “accessible expressions of understandings of being in the world” are to be found.

Returning to George Yule, I am reminded of the possibilities afforded by word formations to an artistic enquiry intersecting with archaeology – an enquiry into the human impulse to constantly come to terms (to re-place ourselves) with(in) a forever changing world.

COINAGE the invention of totally new terms

BORROWING taking over words from other languages

COMPOUNDING a joining of two separate words

BLENDING taking the beginning of one word and joining it to the end of another

CLIPPING a word of more than one syllable reduced to a shorter form

BACKFORMATION reduction of a noun to form a verb

CONVERSION the movement from noun to verb without reduction

ACRONYM formed from the initial letters of a set of other words

DERIVATION (AFFIX) prefix (before), suffix (after), infix (in)

(Yule, George (1996) 2nd edn. The Study of Language Cambridge University Press

Cochrane A. & Russell, I. (2007) Visualizing Archaeologies: a manifesto Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17(1), 3-19)