Symptom
A personal project about psychoanalysis - looking at manifestations of the unconscious through bodily symptoms
Inspiration:
In Psychoanalytic thought, there is the idea that a symptom in a roundabout way can be an expression of something that cannot otherwise be consciously articulated. I find this idea fascinating - that one way of thinking about illness is that symptoms are inherently intelligent; “a way to reclaim a little bit of power” (Anouchka Grose, 2020) or a form of resistance. This is based on the idea that consciousness has gaps - in occurrences such as slips of the tongue, dreams and “everything described as a psychical symptom or an obsession” (Freud, The Unconscious, 1915). Ideas that are repressed (kept out of consciousness because they are intolerable to us), can sneak through the barrier imposed by repression by manifesting as symptom. The symptom gets infused with energy from the unconscious - often from a hidden wish or desire. In this way, the charge of a repressed idea gets converted into something that stimulates a symptom, which in some way “expresses the wishful aim of the instinctual impulse”.
Method:
The main figure of the body was created in black ink, scanned and then its colour manipulated in photoshop. The marble texture was created by marbling paper and then scanning this, and manipulating the colours in a similar way.