Source

There's an innate desire to go back to the beginning;

it's incomprehensible yet our deepest desire to know.

The past 16 months have been chaotic for the world at large, and with the overwhelming amount of information and consequential static that consumes our daily lives, I felt a call to turn inward. I descended into the work of Carl G. Jung, specifically his analysis and interpretation of the collective unconscious and mandala symbolism.

This work began as a composite image of my grandfather and I after I moved in with my grandmother, and where I began to ponder my grandfather's death. I was born on his birthday and always felt a special connection to him, and being surrounded by old memories of him made his presence in my life a felt experience.

The more I tuned out from the world and tuned into my inner knowing, the more I began to realize that this work was showing me the uniting of opposites, specifically the conscious and unconscious mind. Jung interchanges the word “unconscious” with the word “shadow” and describes it as having two layers – the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal is identified more-so by feeling-complexes and individual experiences whereas the collective is described as a deep, intuitive knowing that is shared by all of humankind and can be perceived through primordial images. The uniting of these two worlds is known as the individuation process which is a natural development of the integration of the psyche.

I am fascinated by the pursuit of truth - the search for knowing - and traverse this path through different aspects of psychological and spiritual ideas. Mandala symbolism and numerology can be examined through both of these lenses and that is where the idea for the geometric shape of the piece began. The center is a jagged circle which is representative of the self – the wholly integrated being with the goal of returning to the source of everything. Surrounding that is a diamond made up of archival family photos, figuratively displaying fragmented memories frozen in time and symbolically representing the unconscious. Layered on top of the unconscious content is twelve silkscreen prints that have been deconstructed and reconstructed to show the process of uniting dualities; they have been hand-stitched together with a needle and thread to represent the DNA that links not only my grandfather and me, but the whole of humanity.

I decided on the arrangement of the twelve prints because I became obsessed with the words uttered by Maria Prophetissa, “one becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” Viewing the work left to right shows you columns that number the prints in order from 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1.Jung believes that she was describing the individuation process from unity consciousness to the split of that unity into the conflict of opposites. The third hints at a potential resolution which is a transcendental activity that brings harmony to the chaos, and the one as the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness - back to wholeness.