Inner Garden– 2018
Diploma project
mixed media / embroidery, pen drawing, watercolour and acrylic on textile/
310 x 210 cm
2018
I consider my diploma thesis "Inner Garden" as the cornerstone of my creative work. This spatial installation was nine months in the making and was the first work in which I began to explore themes of my theoretical interests through my artistic expressions.
The realisation of the interconnectedness of powerful psychic processes that I had experienced on my own skin had a great impact on my way of thinking. In my early twenties, having recovered from even the aftershocks of anorexia nervosa, a psychological illness that had permeated my teenage years, the previously invisible became visible for the first time. In my personal example, the external influences that I had experienced and lived through over the years, which invisibly interwove my daily life and instead of being recognised, grew on me as a completely natural factor, causing self- and body-image disturbances. The inextricable intertwining of negative and positive childhood experiences and the subsequent recognition of the functioning of the various internal mechanisms was very decisive, so I became interested in researching the subject in general.
Reading the psychological studies of C. G. Jung, I arrived at the basis of the concept, which was an attempt to visually evoke the organic connections between consciousness and unconscious content. My aim was to draw on my personal life, my memories and my environment to create a space in which most of the people who have some influence on me could find a place. My family, my loved ones, my university classmates, my childhood friends, my joy- and disappointment makers, my abusers, my lovers, my teenage bullies, fictional characters from films and cartoons sit side by side in conversation in this fictional garden.
H. Bosch's art has always been a great influence on me, and I think of this work as a personal transcription of his Garden of Delights.
The Interior Garden was my first textile-based work, which, in addition to the idea of scale, was brought to life naturally by the depiction of soft materiality and the desire for a floating sensation. Both of my grandmothers were seamstresses, I grew up with the presence of threads and textiles and yarns, their scent, the monotonous sound of the snipping of sewing shears and the clatter of a sewing machine, so I have close emotional ties to these materials in addition to their symbolic content. The dominant medium of the work is embroidery, which contrasts the pre-planning of monotonous repetitive sequences of movements with the constant sub-surface sprawl that forms invisibly as the work is being done. The two surfaces of the textile are simultaneously formed in a controlled and uncontrolled way, so that the image that emerges on both sides is ultimately formed together as a whole. With the duality of the partially coordinable malleability and the unpredictable hidden presence of the background, I reflected on the functioning of the poles of consciousness and subconsciousness.
