Sometimes the work is very personal

There are times when my art is really a vehicle to support myself emotionally, a way to understand an inner dynamic and in that, to create an icon of that understanding that can stand outside of myself, reminding me of what I have come to know. I call this working in ‘aspect art’.

My husband and I seemed to again and again get into a dynamic of communication where it was as if weren’t really hearing each other. We would end up feeling defensive and soon we wouldn’t know what we were actually arguing about but we both felt hurt.

My sister is an astrologer and showed me on our over-laid charts two squares. She said we each had a square in our place of communication and in astrology, this is a ‘fixed-boxed’ quality. Knowing about it leads you to understand that in certain situations you will always experience this sense of being blocked. She then show me how our individual squares met up, as it were, in the house of early childhood. So, she said at those times when you feel these loops of tense communication you are really reacting to old patterns from childhood. It’s as if one’s internalized ‘mother’ is meeting the other’s internalized mother and old conflicts are in play. Her advice was to be aware and to break the pattern by simply stopping the conversation. She said when you find yourselves repeating or confronting each other and only feeling hurt, not in touch with the originating point, just stop. Say to yourself, “We’re in these boxes of communication.” Stop. Go away. Wait until the emotional circuitry stops looping and start again. This information really resonated with me and I found I was able to ‘stop’, even sometimes when my husband did not.

This piece came to me fully in a dream. The gold figure is the male. Silver the female. In astrology Sun [gold] is male and Moon [silver] is female. The front square has individual vintage pictures of our mothers. The other 3 sides have pictures of us with our mother. The ‘boxes’ were originally votive holders. The figures were not only glued into the boxes, but I poured resin into the boxes to represent the feeling being bound and stuck by the patterns of the past. This pieces serves me very effectively as a reminder to pause, to stop, to wait for the past to stop reverberating, to stay present. The boxes are 3” square and the figures are painted 5” porcelain dolls.

Image name: Boxed Communication

Check out my sister’s website at www.jacquimenkes.com