“An artist’s job is to articulate what might otherwise be incoherent.” Nancy Spero
My love affair with the artist Nancy Spero is recent and on point with my psychological, therefore artistic, development. Recently, I’ve begun experimenting with imagery alongside text because I’ve found that increasingly the topics I want to circulate with my thoughts, hence understand, are pre-verbal. Only images will do. It’s strange, I’ve always been an image maker, yet I’ve never given imagery its proper mental place of power in my interpretation of my work. I cloak them, but truth be told, images come first in my writing and plot develops around said image, so when I (loosely) plot a novel, I always have a series of imagery I want to build a story around. It doesn’t go the other way.
I started The Sculptor with three images: a man sanding down a woman’s wooden torso, an unearthly woman rising out of the Mississippi river at night, a house fire. Then I asked myself what it was that I wanted to say? I wanted to talk about art, small town racism, and resurrection. So, I developed a plot around those images that spoke for me. For Dark Ansley, it was a girl shifting into a moth and entering someone’s ear, a seed inside a child, a glowing helix of DNA inside a jar. My themes are abandonment, resurrection, and the shift of one thing into another through rebirth. I have others, but these are my main recurring themes. And, maybe it’s because I’m only recently psychologically ready to become more honest, more confessional inside my work – are images more confessional than words? – that I’ve turned to images to represent something I can’t find the words for. Maybe it’s because I see more images now than ever before. I don’t know. But returning to Nancy Spero makes me appreciate her deft balance between thoughts that are public and thoughts that are personal. A writer is a person who likes to think. Their thoughts cannot be fixed and need to swirl around repeated themes and imagery. Also, there is a level of unconscious honesty and complexity that imagery inhabits that I’m drawn to. Nancy Spero, in particular The Torture of Women (a 125ft long collage, two years in the making) is the perfect example of how mental growth, social growth, and artistic growth go hand in hand.
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/spero-nancy/
I hope this finds you healthy and inspired,
Gret x
Gret Heffernan is the Editor-in-Chief of www.backlashpress.com and author of The Sculptor and Dark Ansley, Book One and Book Two
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