Charli de Koning
Catharsis, Pandemonium, and Evocative Entropy
Catharsis, Pandemonium, and Evocative Entropy is an extension to the art therapy research concerning trauma, memory and emotional regulation through multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory mediums. This project's major focuses include elevating melancholy, anguish, detachment, and anxiety into something tangible, elevating emotions, physicalising repressed memories and exploring human experience.
“The use of creative arts is a...universal instrument utilized for a multitude of human explorations, social connections, personal and spiritual growth experiences. From our early beginnings as cave dwellers, art-making in various creative forms...has been a vital part of the human experience.”1
Evocation is conveyed through the projection of video and immersive sound within the space. The atmosphere is juxtaposed with ethereal audio and psychedelic colours, illustrating the complexities of human experiences and emotion. The diverse art forms operate as a personal therapy session concurrently with access to my human experiences.
1. Sanders, Jamie, 'The Use of Art Therapy: An Exploratory Study' 3.
Visceral and evocative periods of mind-wandering and focused thought are conveyed through a hand-stitched quilt and an abstract, textile-based sculpture that is a symbolic gesture hinting at traumatic memories in the vicinity of the bedroom. Materials are deliberately chosen from the bedroom: bed sheets, curtains, pillowcases and clothing to simultaneously explore abuse and depression. The sigils seen in the hand-stitched quilt represent positive concepts polarising symbolical notions of assault and anguish.
Memories and emotions are revisited as instrumental music, a hand-carved wooden staff incorporating inscriptions in Norse runes and my own alphabet, inspired by Theban (the Witches' alphabet), and alchemist symbols with tangled string and chains symbolically representing tension and feelings of emotional entrapment.
I find value and worthiness in discarded/found materials from items society considers undesirable - redefining the emotional responses from these items, symbolically and physically.
