Alexandra McFarlane

Dog Bite

0 A9 A1434
From left to right: “The Dream”, “The Manifestation”, “The Spew”, “The Explosion”, “The Therapy”.

My research dissects human reactions to a breakdown of consciousness: an abject philosophy that believes excretion and the obliteration of the body show the extended layers of psychological manifestation. 

Describing a physical repulsion such as nausea, transgresses the sphere of mental thought into corporeality. The image has strength and can sway reality. As a fleshly body degrades due to mental disintegration, the destruction is guided by multi-dimensional layers of mentality. Melting, bubbling, dripping, spluttering are symbolic exercises which enkindle death. My practice of oil painting becomes infiltrated by my own bodily matter - hair, as I attempt to fuse abject thought into my art using corporeality. 

Exhibiting visceral splashes and words creates an imaginary territory fenced upon a real entity. Through poetry’s performance, I vocally ask myself the questions as a human in a mixed existence, levered carnally and mentally like a seesaw. Reading aloud poetry unbinds me from traditional one-dimensional thought and I can extend my methodology of writing words.

It is my desired result to represent the unrepresentable, to transgress abstract philosophical ideas into the physical. A possibility exists that reading my poem directly beside or in front of a painting creates a dimensional reality between my words spoken, the painting, and the invisible thing (citing the Lacanian ‘lamella’). 

Death is the final stage, a consequence of acting against reality and its laws. The question begs, where is the border between reality and any layer of consciousness? What constitutes reality when the spectrum between mental and corporeality implodes? 

Extending out into symbolic imagery, gored victims in 1980’s horror films are an area of focus for me, binding moments of reality and symbolic artistry. 

 
0 A9 A1445
The Dream. Oil and charcoal on paper, wire.
0 A9 A1442
The Explosion. Oil on paper, wire.
0 A9 A1441
The Therapy. Oil on paper, wire.
0 A9 A1443
The Spew. Oil and charcoalon paper, wire.
0 A9 A1444
The Manifestation. Oil and charcoal on paper, wire.

Related Artists