Gateways of Trauma and Transformation

First and foremost it needs to be said that my relationship with my mother is one of the brighter aspects of my life. It always has been. I was a child of divorce at the age of 2, and throughout a transitory and very non traditional, often traumatic life, my mother and I have always had an unbreakable bond which is rooted in empathy and a sense of nurturing love. A creative energy with a relentless need to work, and a sometimes damaging need for control, I definitely see aspects of myself in my mother. Both of us have suffered and lived with the disease of addiction in our personal lives and as a result of family and friends in our circumferences. When it became an irrefutable reality that she was deep in the grips of Dementia and then Alzheimer’s disease my world changed, fast, hard, and without mercy . Yet while enduring and moving through these changes aspects of my survival mechanisms and my own person were not able to process the voracious appetite of her disease, and I found myself simply in a constant path of keeping up, with moments of absolute insanity and unexplainable confusion. All of this is to bring us to the point of the artworks which are the substance, or rather the gateway of this article.

Anitya 28”x36”x25”, Burnt branches inside of tin roofing panel, 2021

In the early Spring of 2020 I was in residence at Duke University as part of Duke’s Rubenstein Arts Center’s Artist in Residency Program. I guess in it was technically the end of Winter, but all that seems to be irrelevant now as the emergence of the Covid-19 Global Pandemic has seemingly dissolved any concept of seasons, or at least overshadowed the importance of seasons in that initial onslaught of the disease in the USA. The important marker for me is that I will always remember an extra layer of shift in that moment, as the frantic and chaotic journey of finally hitting that climactic point when my step father and I had no choice left but to put her in a memory care had come but weeks before that global lockdown. In the weeks spent between finally accepting and moving forward in the process of relocating her away from society and us and the shutdown, I found myself in on of the most transformational shifts of my life while in the Residency. The work here marks that absolutely cataclysmic internal shift just before the cataclysmic global shift, and then after a year and a half the re-entry, in 2021, to that art space as the final half of my residency was able to occur this past October. It was throughout that year and then recently into space again that I found I had been transformed completely, lighter, with a deeper sense of foundation found within a sense of the almighty, or simply a fluidity of being, as its seems my mother had as well.

On Awakening (Finding Meaning in Chaos) 40”x30”, mixed media on wood panel, 2020

This work is if anything a representation of time, connection, of transformation, movement, and awakening. A narrative expression of the experience of my mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s as channeled through my experience of being interwoven with her, of being her son, and all of the deep reservoirs of existence that run dry only to find deeper connections of beingness within the evolving internal landscape that carries us through if we let it. A place often refuted by hardcore capitalists and outright denied overtime through colonialism into the modern age by many. The works are obviously about my experience, yet at the same time it cannot be denied that my mother’s experience and energies are as much channeled into this as relationships are an interweaving of connection wherein another’s essence journeys through us in the process that unfolds. Here we reach a place where the artwork transcends any notions of 2-D or 3-D and exists in the 4th dimension where the true essence of every tangential and circulating part of the process of transformation has come to live within the artworks that are the result my output during this time.

Burnt branches in a Ritual Fire Cleansing in relation to my mother’s suffering, passed down from our Celtic and Norse heritage. The sticks are then used to create the work that conveys this process of transformation and homage.

Psychic Landscape, 30”x40”, mixed media on wood panel, 2021. Drawn at the return to the Duke Residency, full circle to where and how the work began in 2020.

And honestly what is this work but a contemplation of mortality. An act of reckoning with the fragile albeit honest existence of the human ego, of the human fears and their opposites, solutions that lead to being free and awake. If we exist in a universe of energies and magnetics, of matter, form, anti matter and formlessness, then how and why are we humans so led by something such the opposite of pure energy. I mean we are incapable of not being so but for intense and lfe long work, but the question is worth asking. Why does our notion of mortality lead us to such harrowing and painful corridors of experience. Why does so often a gateway to either crumble at the thought of security fleeing, or lead us to an embrace of the realization that security is always a constant for we exist, and we do not know what that existence is other than we wake, we sleep, and eventually we are put back into some other cycle, wherein the understanding that security is simply a set of fleeting ideals gives us the view that we are in fact always secure, or that security does not actually exist but for our emotional and ego based existence. Easier said than lived on a consistent basis, we are emotional ego based beings, so while we become awake to certain aspects of our being others will continue to create that tension, which is obviously as vital to life as any other part. but the impetus is there once its been reached at least once. Once we face the void to find out we are more free and powerful in our acceptance of something deeper that is beyond our explanation. And what of “stuff”, of systems of human creation that very much pull us further and further away from this space of possibility, of security in not needing to control our security. I don’t know, but the process of facing and moving through my mother’s journey with Alzheimers to the days where she would fight and scream and run into the wall (metaphorically) to the time after she finally found peace in a facility was the stuff that reminded me of my fragile humanness. And the result of empowerment also re-enforced the beauty of my fragile humanness. It opened me up like an empty vessel who thought itself whole, and showed me the frailties in what I clung to for my idea of self, of being ok, of having a foundation and a place, and showed me that there is a deeper power, there is a place where all of that exists perpetually regardless. It took me to a place where I also found the active connection with art making and a sort of alchemy of change that created documents of her chaos and solace, that gave myself to the illustration of her metaphysical journey as it channeled through me. And then of my own digestion of it and thus to ways of conveying balance and contemplation. The work is almost like spell casting, or a psychic automatic outpouring of my connection to an unseen place. It embraces fundamental aspects of human possibility and spaces that we find ourselves in through the most truly transformational experiences.

Grateful Mortality, 20”x16”, Hand smeared homemade charcoal and collage on wood panel, 2021

Observance (photo of Ritual), burnt bundles, 2021

The process of losing my mother as I have always known her, losing those parts of her that had some connection to the reality that I see everyday, to basic societal actions like driving, going to work, being home for dinner, was cataclysmic. Alzheimer’s is a fundamental chaos agent, a re-arranger of the structures of belief that we as humans in a society have become fixed to. It does not care what we think is real, how we have been doing things forever, what relationships are, it does not care. Alzheimer’s degenerates the person with it to a space where a completely different set of realities morphing into and out of one another at an unexplainable, unfixed, ever shifting rate becomes their reality. All of these so called realities seem to become a huge multiverse that shifts constantly depending on how the mind is slowly dying, in essence waking up parts of the mind perhaps that have not been able to have influence or agency. It is honestly incredible in a certain way of seeing. My mother went from constantly trying to make sense of chaos and senselessness in her mind, trying to tether herself to something she “knew”, to letting herself just be in a shifting fazing spread of completely different and perceived realities all at once and finally knows her world to be real to the point where there is no question. She is not crazy, she is sane within the realm of her perspective, in her world we are the crazy ones if we can’t keep up with her vision. We see it as crazy yet make ourselves crazy trying to get her to see things our way, which is impossible and futile and honestly ignorant and a bit disrespectful. All of this leads to the truth that her spirit has transcended something so immense, it has pushed and broken through so many layers of demons, of acceptance, of fear, and of limitation that it finally after all these years is full again as her the barriers of her mind are breaking into nothingness slowly. Her spirit is something beyond that of which I have seen in the last 20 years. She is finally free in a place that is free of anyone’s force of logic on her being. This work at its rawest is about that journey, and about my own journey of becoming a newly realized being as a result of accepting her experience and our transitory yet vibrant bond. We human’s no little of existence beyond our idea of safety until that safety is shattered and we are forced be filled with something much bigger. This work is also in part a ritual process of coming to that place. It honors home and the ability of that concept to become bigger as we evolve. It honors love, it honors spirit, and it honors life as well as the opposite. Buddhist monks have explained the journey toward nothingness, which is in fact a sort of wholeness, it is everything, yet is empty and nothing. It is within that emptiness that exists wholeness for they are the same. I feel that this is where my mother is going in her disease, and this work is a visceral visualization of the process as we experience it in connection.

Gateways of Trauma and Transformation

The Saga Continues...

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