april 21 2012

I placed 9 busts of unfired clay in the sea to see what would happen if they were being exposed to the forces of nature. The process was filmed and then made into a 13 min movie. The final installation was a movie with the remains of the sculptures.

2012 is now 12 years ago. 12 years is a cycle. 12 years ago was (apparently) the year of the water dragon. Reading that made me laugh. water dragons are far-sighted with perseverance but lack of individuality. They will have many romantic dates. They should make full use of this to search for their true love.

I am not a water dragon, i am a gold swine (dissapointed emoji). Gold swines are apparently bittersweet and their finances dwindle easily due to extravagance (again dissapointed emoji)

whatever…

It is now Saturday and I spent already too much time writing about a work that is now 12 years ago, but on the other hand writing about old work always pays off. it makes one see what a road one has travelled since then and how the work has evolved. But then again, I also at the same time feel that everything goes in cycles and I am again back at a certain point in the cycle, same point but different level, closer to myself and again in conflict with myself since I am stuck in my current creative work since a while now. Or maybe not so much stuck, but rather in conflict with the ‘‘theme’’ of my work: flowers and still life. As I am maybe also in conflict with the still life that is going on inside me. The menopauze that is kicking in like a ruthless witch, bereaving me of my youth, my beauty, my eggs. I was never a fan of still lives in art, they are so ‘still’. But here I am and I know this is the way to go. I always follow the way to go, even if it is a hot and dry desert path.

Paradise of surrender was not dry nor desert.

It was a wonderful and intense trip and it was made in the best possible way I could do at that time in terms of vision, filming, editing, sound etc.. It was filmed with two cameras because for me it was important that there was a collective and an individual perspective on the sculptures. To see how each sculpture was hit by the waves in a different way and thus separated from the group, going through their own battle with the sea. After having been exposed to the sea for 7 hours, all but one (the front one) came out withered by the sea, but o so beautiful. Like coral. At the end I collected all the remaining parts like archaeological remains and integrated them in the installation.

I hope that one day I will look like one of my sculptures, beautiful like salty coral, withered by a life well lived.

My perfect house is a coffee grinder

Is a spontaneous drawing I made somewhere in the early 2010’s that I came across while going through layers of sketches and mood board sediments in my studio.

It made me laugh and it made me curious about that person who made the sketch. I must have been in my early forties and my kids in their full puberty. I know this because the next drawing in the sketchbook was one of a grumpy teenage daughter sitting on a chair, probably bored out of her mind like only teens can be.

I think the drawing was made around the same time when I made all the papier maché masks that, instead of hiding as is usually the function of a mask, reveal a lot about how I subconsciously felt at that time about being a mom, a homemaker, a wife, a daughter, an artist etc.. The title of the work is roles, expectations, aspirations. Subconsciously I experienced all this but I would never have consciously allowed myself to admit these aggressive, hopeless, angry, sexual feelings to bubble up. Aggression and anger are still emotions that are not welcomed in women and definitely not in mothers. Little girls are supposed to be ‘nice’ and ‘taking care of the little brother or sister,pet or whatever’ and fighting or sexuality is altogether a taboo. We are mostly conditioned to be likeable and loveable and caring.

And I am sure I was a caring and loving mother most of the times, but what about all the other, ‘less presentable to the world’ emotions living in me? what to do with them?

At the same time, in another sketchbook, I found drawings of one of my kids that shocked the good, innocent mom in me by their aggressive dark imagery. They must have been made around same time that we were all living in my coffee grinder house.I had to think of what Jung said that, if the parent is not aware of his or her shadow, it might be lived out by the next generation and then you as a parent might think: ‘’oh and I tried so hard to do my best to live an exemplary life and look what came of my children, they are so and so and I have no idea where that comes from?’’ And then I think of Annie M.G. Schmidt’s hilarious poem ‘het zoetste kind’, about Pieter Hendrik Hagelslag, the perfect boy who marries the perfect girl. And then they get six children that are totally the opposite. So funny and so wise, worthwhile to check it out.

So to get to my point: I am happy I made the masks, they sold well and I could totally ‘’get rid of my egg’ while making them. They were hilarious, yet serious and sometimes disturbing , which can be a good combo. And in a way they were a sort of self therapy because once the energy is out, it is out. But!! What if I had talked to a professional therapist who has a good sense of how to work with the creative mind mom person, I might have kept my artistic inspiration and zeal, but at the same time it could have saved me much neurotic guilt about being ‘a good enough mother or not’. I would have talked about it to my kids and openly could have discussed my role as human instead of godly mother. If I had done this consciously my kids might have been more relaxed with their own darkness and so called less 'positive' or 'performing' qualities. who knows..?

So knowing what I know now, when my kid would make a drawing like that and I would see it I would totally psychologise him or her (haha). No, not, but i would definitely start a conversation about anger, aggression, unallowed feelings etc..

Because, what is actually an ‘’unallowed’’ feeling?? No, they don’t exist, all feelings are human and allowed. It is the living or living out of the emotions that must be questioned and talked about.

Again, why do I write all this? Because 1. to vent. Because 2. I so believe in the power of image, symbol, as a bridge to the unconscious and a foreteller of what direction your life is taking. And if you are aware of it, you can make a choice! You have every moment of the day the choice to take a different direction if you are not happy with how your life is going or if you feel neurotic about something in your life.

Because 3. I think that our culture is, under the guise of ''being correct'' also doing a lot of damage to ourselves, to a part of ourself that is not so presentable and that, when, not given attention to, we see in the outside world as dangerous and aggressive instead of dealing with it in ourselves.

In my practice I give clients the chance to let the images, be it on paper or in clay or in dance language, speak for them, let them know what is living inside of them that wants to be known. And I have witnessed, as well as I have experienced it myself, that it is so freeing to do this. Long live the image, even if it is a house that is a coffee grinder!! Don’t be afraid of the image, once it is out and you see it comes from a part of yourself that wants to be known, you are safe!!

charcoal drawing 2012

a symbol remains a symbol until it loses its healing function as an intermediary between the conscious and the unconscious.

A leidmotiv in my work from 2017 to 2020.
In 2019 I started my training as a Jungian analyst and started my own analysis. That defintely affected my work, but I cannot fully grasp it myself yet. Just as I cannot fully understand the reason for my symbolic use of the unicorn. A symbol remains a symbol until it loses its magic medicine as a healing function between the conscious and the unconscious. Mostly it is because we fully understand it, it is fully in the light, accepted and maybe even integrated. We then no longer need to hold onto the symbol, can let it go. Art can work wonderfully well to get to know your symbols, to get to know what lives inside you that steers your behavior ( both welcome and annoying behaviors).

As an analyst I mainly listen to and mirror the analysant. In the mirror they see themselves and the images that have accompanied them throughout their lives.
Working on these images in clay or paper or whatever material suits them, can help to see them from a distance and a 360° viewpoint.
If anything, it is immensely relieving and energizing to ‘get it out of your system’.
🦄

going back to go forward

In these dark days, in this time when I feel caught between two stories, both professionally and personally, it is good to look back at the origins of certain works. It helps to see where it came from and to fall in love again with the most beautiful thing there is: making sense of the world through creating images. Trying to understand the world in and around you. And attempting to see where it will go in the future...

where does it come from, where does it lead to?

Heading for the purple planet, the desired state en still life in still life. Waar komt het vandaan, waar gaat het heen. The making of🩷 🪐💫🌏🌈

#headingforthepurpleplanet#continuationoflife#thedesiredstate#whatishappening#contemporarysculpture

creative urge and personality development

This is the title of my graduation thesis to become a Jungian analytic therapist.

A sneak peak into its content:

A study about the question whether artistic creativity favours or impedes personality development, based on Otto Ranks statement from his book Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development with Louise Bourgeois as case study.

 ‘’Artistic creativity does not favour the personality, but, up to a certain point, impedes it, since it forces on the artist a professional ideology, which more and more penetrates the human self and finally absorbs it.’’ Otto Rank

What did he mean by that ?

In very short….

The modern artist is a romantic who makes art based on the old collective art ideologies. Primitive and classical art were based on collective ideologies of eternity of the soul and the ideal beauty respectively. The modern art ideology is based on the psychological ideology of the artist. He no longer believes in the immortality of the soul or the ideal beauty but he wants to tell his own truth. Rank stands with both feet in the romantic tradition. For him, an artist is someone who, from an urge to create out of fear of life, is in conflict with the prevailing ideology. He sacrifices his life to live out his individual art ideology in his creations but by doing so runs the risk of losing himself. The neurotic artist may turn to psychotherapy to deal with this conflict because he wants to understand himself. Rank had predicted in his first book The Artist in 1905 that too much self-consciousness would hinder creativity and that the resulting void would be filled by a psychotherapist. 25 years later, when he wrote Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development in 1930 (he had analysed many artists himself), he came to the conclusion that this was still true. According to him, art in 1930 was in a limbo between its old collective religious or social function and its new function as a developer of personality. Psychotherapy was on the rise and the quality of the art, the pure creativity, had to suffer. The modern artist is held back from his pure creativity by psychology. He comes into conflict with himself because his impulse is held back by the fear of going to the fullest or because he completely identifies with his ideology and becomes engulfed and enters a neurotic state. Psychoanalysis or psychotherapy won't help him, Rank says, because they'll steer or normalize him toward false artistry. The artist must first work on himself (with or without the help of therapy) in order to get out of the neurosis and only then can he choose whether to continue a life with or without art.

where does Louise Bourgeois come in?

I find Rank’s quote about the artistic creativity impeding personality development very intriguing, especially in combination with the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois because she spent 34 years in psychoanalysis and eventually said: ''Freud did nothing for the artists or for the artist's problem. That's why artists repeat themselves, because they have no access to a cure.'' Bourgeois is one of the leading female artists of the 20th century. Her drawings, sculptures and installations, which she has made in her seven-decade career, are memories and processing of events from her childhood. For me, Louise Bourgeois is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art in terms of the union of psychology and art. I regard her art as a beacon for that turning point of which Otto Rank speaks, that new age that dawned in his time, but had not yet arrived. Much has been written about Louise Bourgeois, but she has mainly been studied from a Freudian perspective. The result of most research is that she has freed herself from Freud's patriarchal psychoanalytic system by carrying her feminist art through her psychoanalysis and has introduced the female Oedipus complex into art. In the book Fantastic Reality, the art historian Mignon Nixon writes about Louise Bourgeois: ‘‘Like psychoanalysis, the history of modern art needs a theory of the maternal subject, and Bourgeois' sculpture plays a pivotal role in constructing it. '' In this thesis I will investigate how I can illuminate her inner conflicts, her art and the psychoanalysis from which her art originated from a Rankian perspective

She eventually said that Freud can do nothing for the artist,. But what exactly was the benefit of the analysis, otherwise she wouldn't have gone through with it?

And what can the therapist, according to Rank, do for the conflicted artist?

All this and more can be found in my thesis.

for more information on the content or if you are interested in reading the thesis, feel free to contact me via email: annabelleschatteman@gmail.com

Oh yes, forgot to mention it: it is so far only in Dutch…working on it to translate it.

10 years ago

Exactly 10 year ago was my First exhibition in the Hague. I exhibited my plaster works that deal with the inner and outer conflict of being a mother and an artist. Two forces pulling and pushing me in opposite directions.

Now, 10 years later with the kids almost all out of the house and rethinking/reliving/reinventing my roles and functions, I am writing a thesis that will contribute to my graduating as an analytical psychotherapist. when I saw this picture appear in my photomemories this morning, it struck me that the thesis deals with more or less the same issues as the sculpture 10 years ago.

In the thesis I will discuss the theories of one of Freud's closest colleagues, the Austrian psychoanalyst/philosopher Otto Rank (1884-1939). He studied the psyche of the artist and wrote extensively about the role personality development, in the form of therapy or analysis, was going to play for the conflicted artist and what that could mean for the art, the artist and society.

He is not an easy read, to say the least, but it is definitely worth trying to grasp his vision on the conflicts of the artist and the outcome of 'consciousness' in art. As case study I will look at the some of the works of Louise Bourgeois who was in Freudian analysis for 34 years and hold them under a Rankian lens.

If all this ends well I will be so wise and intelligent and never again have a conflict between art and life.:))) Amen

still life in still life

I am obesessed with the changing colours and shapes of the flowers. This morning I woke up and saw the amaryllis is bleeding. It looks like menstruation. It is a good moment to disclose that this urge to make this series originates in my fascination with menstrual blood. I always enjoyed it because it made me think of my kids and how they smelled like my blood straight after birth. They smelled like caramel, sweet and salty. And this is how I always experienced the smell of menstrual blood. It is very instinctual. Now that I am entering menopauze ( I still think we need a sexier word) I feel I want to honour the blood, the life, the pain and the pleasure of a period that is coming to an end. I am dreading it, but I also know that change is inevitable. This whole series “still life in still life” is a feast for the colour red and the shape of a flower in its container.

still life in still life

2022

glazed ceramics, flower

still life in still life (detail)

2022

glazed ceramics, flower

still life in still life (detail)

2022

glazed ceramics, flower

that familiar feeling

of being on the right track but not exactly knowing what the end station will be nor how many stopovers the train is going to take or what they are called. You know that you need to be where you are but not exactly why and that you cannot jump off the train because the journey needs to be taken. That.

Under my spell, still. I cannot talk about the content because that reveals itself only while travelling. It should not make sense, just feel right.

Besides pieces in wood, I started making lino cuts to ….I don’t know, to ..hm….glue the pieces together.

what glueing the pieces together looks like

total totem craze

Since covid I started working with wood, carving tree trunks for fun, using old trees I had kept since ever, also the one in my garden that was dead and needed to be removed. One in my backgarden and one in my frontgarden. I was quite nervous to start the one in my frontgarden because of all the comments I would get. In the beginning I used headphones to avoid hearing the people's comments, but people would just ignore that and asked me a million questions anyways, so in the end I just pretended to know what I was doing and faced them, ignoring the idea that they thought I was weird. I had one goal, to finish it before the autumn rains because the tree was quite damaged and rotten and I had to impregnate it to avoid further rotting. It worked, I finished it just one weekend before the long rainy period. Now that it is winter and the totem is finished I look back and miss that period where I had a lot of contact with my neighbourhood and random passers by. It was so much fun to get to know people and to talk about life and hear their stories, because in the end that is what people love to do, to tell their story. The totem is a chapter, a chain in my new work that will have fairy tale aspects and woodwork. I am very excited to work on the story. will keep u posted.x

under my spell

Is how I baptised all the work that is being created alongside `the desired state`the new work that I am currently making and want to show in Dusseldorf next year.  It will show the remains of animalistic and human organisms that once formed a civilization that has been eradicated, despite elements of defense.  In this work I hope to build further on my vision about human strength and fragility, the story about the masked and unprotected humanity. About the continuation of life; and  how…?

But somehow, alongside this work, some other work made their way to my hands. One of them is this work that is called in u door u en met u.

in u door u en met u

glazed ceramics, wood

Clay works

Clay still forks for me now and always has. Clay works from 2013-2015 on show now at bliep_bliep art gallery in Ghent. www.bliep-bliep.be  Be loved in everything positive (great motto!).  From left to right: portraitsofafamily/afamilyofportraits (glazed ceramics) (photo by Syreetah), Shrew II (glazed ceramics)(photo by Syreetah), Shrew I (glazed ceramics), masks (ceramics and glazed ceramics)(photo by Syreetah).  

a lie holds the truth, a fairy tale tries to find it

game over.

clay and porcelain

Don`t know exactly what I am doing but I am doing something which is a begining. I know I will understand what I am doing at some point but now it just happens and I let it. It has to do with fairy tale,with a  quest and maybe even rituals (which I believe my work is anyway always connected to). I have no plan, just ideas and I am reading a bunch of books about fairy tales. I just make what I want to make not what I think I should be doing , which is make a good concept and follow it. I think it will be ok if I just trust my intuition. It always is.

x

portrait of my father

Forget forgetting to make the portrait, forget trying to make something else of it because it does not work out. I have to make that portrait, basta.  It is now or never. In this mindset I eventually succeeded in creating the portrait I was satisfied with. I finally trusted my hands to know exactly what to do because his face was still in their memory, which is very natural if you have known someone all your life. Lately I subconsciously scanned his faced with my mind`s eye many times because I knew he was getting old and time with us was getting shorter.

For the rest I keep asking myself `why would one still make a sculpted portrait? Isn`t that pure hybris? Isn`t it terribly outdated etc...`. I do not have the answer except for the fact that I had to make it and I enjoyed making it.   

So now it is finished and I have to decide what to do with it.  I think i will make a mould to preserve this portrait because I know that one day it will be very precious to me, the day that i dread...the day I realise my memory of him starts to fade. 

between heaven and earth

is a state of being. Trying to grasp infinity, non physicality while trying to stay in touch with the earth. Some media help you to get closer to heaven, other carriers bring you in touch with the earth. The divine burial songs of William Croft helped me to get through the church ceremony for the burial of my father a few weeks ago, they helped me carry my grief and bring it out of my body towards the sky. The clay, the charcoal, the pencils, the paper, the paint assist me in my attempts at making my grief physical. Merely attempts so far.

Up until a few weeks ago I was well on my way to make a new body of work that I had and, as yet,  baptised ` the desired state`  It had to become a world of everything that I had fun in making; from flowers to clouds to unicorns to birds..some sort of paradise, I guess. Until...my father suddenly became ill and passed away in the blink of an eye. And so, overnight, my paradise world became irrelevant, redundant. The only thing that I found myself doing the last weeks  is to try to make the unphysical physical, to turn back the time, to try to make him come to life again with my hands as if it were some sort of pygmalion....and I fail. I fail no matter how many portraits I try to make. They are not him. It is even so that the more portraits I try to make the bigger the distance between us becomes because I get frustrated with an image that is not coming to life by itself and that I do not succeed in making properly. Why on earth do I want that `right` image so badly, what do I need to prove? As if the image is the new him which is of course absolutely ridiculous and a course of mind that is to avoid. Unless( I now suddenly see while writing it down)....I stop fighting it and find a way of seeing that in the frustration itself lies the image or ` the story` and let this be part of  the `desired state` ? I have no idea how but i guess the only way to find out is to try. Now...when writing this, I feel some sort of spark that lifts me up and carries me.X

Below an idea of what kept me busy in the last months

And with this blog entry the purple planet circle is officially round

Heading for the purple planet. All the doubts towards the exhibition put aside, I could not have had a better moment and/or location for the kick off of this installation. It is hard to capture in pictures, therefore I had a little  film made to give an impression of the atmosphere that transformed the chapel for two weeks. The soundscape was also part of the installation.

The film speaks for itself, but I want to spend a few extra words on the light (editing choices we had to make, made it impossible to reproduce the same effect as the reality) The light that shone through the windows was an unrehearsed, unforeseen and unable to reproduce element in the installation.The stained glass chapel windows` colours took me completely by surprise as they appeared to be green, yellow and purple which are exactly the colours of my work.... crazy, just crazy (also that I had not seen that before, but maybe if I had, then it would not have worked or...is that not how magic works..?)   Just like the sea helped me to make a new work in paradise of surrender, so the purple planet was transformed by the light. And in this way it became, just like paradise of surrender, a sort of ritual wherein everything works together to transcend/celebrate/honour ..

enjoy

video to give an impression about the exhibition `heading for the purple planet` in Sint-Amanduskapel. June 2017. Camera and video by Mathieu Rynwalt.

die a thousand deaths

6th of April was the date of my last blog. In this short time span between then and now I died several deaths. Every time I make an exhibition I think `why do I do this to myself?`. I do not consider myself a masochist but, honestly, this comes very close. When making the work and being completely into it, I am full of confidence and I know that this is what I want to say. But then comes all the organising, the inviting people and the publicly announcing of what I thought so confidently about and I shrink and have lots of imaginary conversations with myself that undoubtedly and mercilessly result in hara-kiri. To die an honourable self inflicted death before anyone else kills me is more appealing than being slaughtered by critique.  

Enfin, In two weeks I will be there and stand there and smile there and be confident there. It is after all about courage and stamina and vulnerability, this `heading for the purple planet`. About Striding forward with all your means and imperfections to go to this world where you believe in. Yesterday I thought `what I can offer the viewer is nothing more or less than this small perforation hole in the reality that we commonly accept as a given`. This image that is what I hold onto now...nothing but a small perforation in reality..... It calms me and puts things in perspective.

For the next two weeks I will try to walk the zen path to the chapel. And quite a path is is.

heading for the purple planet

Working on the exhibition in the Chapel of Campo Santo in Gent (Sint-Amandsberg).

Campo Santo is an exhibition Chapel that is situated on a burial site just outside the centre of Ghent in Sint Amandsberg. `` heading for the purple planet`` is the title of the exhibition and it is about the female as a symbol of protection and continuation of life. It should become a group of womenlike figures who are on their way to another place where the continuation of life can be assured. The figures are built up out of building material, porcelain and ready made objects. 

The work is raw, fragile and 1000 other doubts. It started off as only sketches and that is what it stayed, sketches. Exhibiting sketches and be serious about them feels like going to a battlefield unarmed. But somehow this is how it should be. And after all life is nothing but a sketch, you only get to do it once and everything for the first time. This is what I tell myself and what I have to believe now....

For a Long time I had an instinctive allergy against exhibiting on this spot and up till now I sometimes think I will cancel last minute, but also I have this need fuelled by anger to fill the chapel with female energy against all this patriarchal stupidity that has caused so much destruction and pain in the name of ideologies. Also, the graveyard that the chapel is built on is a sort of `Père Lachaise of Ghent` where the `meritorious` Gentians are buried, most of them men of course. The exhibition will be dedicated to my grandmother who died in childbirth after giving birth to her first child, my father. She died because the church, in case of doubt to save the mother or the child, strongly advised the father to sacrifice the mother. She died for the continuation of life...she was buried on a graveyard close to Campo Santo, she did not belong to the meritocracy, she was just another woman who died in childbirth. There are no statues for all the women who died in childbirth but there is, in almost every city, a statue for the anonymous soldier who died in a war. what kind of world did we make??? It is time to head for that purple planet and start all over again. 

motherdaughter/daughtermother

some things are bound to happen because it is the law of nature

children leave parents 

daughters leave mothers

it can be painful

you spend hours raising them to be independent when they are older

and then comes the moment they are

you spend hours making a portrait as you like it

and then comes the moment it is

and it explodes

air or plaster pieces

I accuse plaster

I accuse myself

too much tolerance for plaster in my clay environment

I can live with the plater diagnosis

I think of the motherartist/artistmother piece

It all makes sense

this law of nature

portrait making process

This summer I started a portrait of my daughter who is leaving to house to study abroad.There was not much time left when I decided to recreate her (;-), so what started off as normal posing sessions, we had to finish via FaceTime. making a portrait of her was a good step in the process of letting go. I had to look very closely, absorbing all her her features like my eyes were glued onto her. It made her very uncomfortable at times. I told her ``you owe me that, I am your mother :-), this always works``. Here you can see a little overview of the ups and downs of the creation. The excavation of the portrait did not go as planned and the whole buste collapsed. Luckily I was able to save her face (in the literal sense). Now wait till it is dry and then glaze her in a soft white...looking forward to add some frosting to the cake! Life gets sweeter that way.