Artist Statement
Artist Statement
Bio:
Lindsay Swan is a sculptor, painter, and printmaker. She received her BFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia in Athens, GA. Swan is presently working on her MFA focusing on ceramics at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Steeped in the mystical, surrealistic, and animistic, she taps into subconscious dream-states to develop imagery.
Swan began working with a collective of Visionary artists in Los Angeles, California. In 2011, she trained in Ernst Fuchs’ Mischtechnik, an aggregate of 14th century painting techniques using egg tempera. Swan is affiliated with the Merry Pranksters known for their Happenings and originally led by Ken Kesey. In 2010, she painted a mural on the upper deck of the Further Bus, the first work to be incorporated on this symbol of counterculture in over a decade.
Artist Statement:
Creating art therapeutically can help cope with stress, work through traumatic experiences, facilitate memory recollection, and increase self-awareness. This installation represents the use of clay as a medium to document my path towards healing as a survivor of early childhood abuse. In my early twenties, I began to experience waking flashbacks and night terrors as fragmented memories from early childhood dissociated traumas surfaced. Conventional therapies had little to no effect on these overwhelming symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I was recommended to the Wasiwaska Research Center in Brazil. Through a combination of Conventional and Shamanic therapeutic techniques, I began experiencing breakthroughs in my healing process. These experiences drew me to this topic, where I explored the use of art to organize, process, and reintegrate traumatic memories to present visually what Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, calls the Individuation Process. In this installation, I utilized clay to document previously dissociated memories of the personal unconscious, process memories connected to my conscious recollections, and explored archetypal imagery tied to the collective unconscious.
The theme of fragmentation was incorporated into many facets of my work since it symbolizes my life experiences. Like a survivor of early childhood trauma, the clay body must go through multiple trials by fire, and has the potential to become fractured, cracked, or broken in the bisque and later the glaze fire. Through the process of building and firing large scale ceramic work, I embraced fractures, flaws, and imperfections. I incorporated rag rope into the installation for the same purpose by tearing sheets and clothing from my childhood into strips and twisted them together with strips of new fabric; symbolized piecing together remnants or fragments as part of my healing process. By binding them together into rope strengthened the material, just as the process of carving or writing fractured memory journals onto clay empowered my healing process through those traumas. I wanted the material to resonate with my own human experience.
My current ceramic installation work is driven by my desire to help others through the visual representation of my personal journey of healing. Survivors often feel isolated and internalize the blame. Connecting with other survivors strengthened my resolve to continue working with this subject matter and has given me a sense of community, which has assisted my healing through mutual support.
