Claire Docking
The Me that is not Me.
“A weight of meaningless, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.”
My art practice revolves around the representation of emotions and states of mind: a release of mental states that I cannot verbally discuss or communicate truthfully. The act of drawing on paper captures emotion through every stroke of the pen, and I find it a medium that captures the presence of the artist; weight, form, and flow of line are remnants of the creator.
The images produced throughout my art practice are the product of my ‘other’: the me that is not me. It is my ‘other’ that conceived the imagery, and the ‘self’ that birthed them. My physical being is not represented, but rather the internal self. Using reflections of the internalised self, I disconnect myself from the emotions that conceived the images. By utilising abject imagery, the figures represent the cathartic release of parts of me that I want to shed from my psyche: weakness, anxiety and grief. Such a release transfers the internalised emotions onto paper where they will stay; a vision of hell that gazes out for others to look upon and decipher.
