Transmutations of Emotional Energy: Ceramics, Fibre, and Flesh

By
Malina I. Sintnicolaas
BFA, York University, 2018
A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2020

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Abstract

This document explores the ways in which emotional energy, such as sentiments associated with
depression, trauma, and anxiety, can be represented in a physical form with the mediums of ceramic
and fibre sculpture. It discusses the ways in which using these materials’ properties can represent the
complexities of these vibrations. When treating mood disorders or mental illness, when you are able to
imagine something abstract like emotions as an image, form or object, it brings validity to it, and it
brings something easy to visualize in order to work on ways to treat it. Therefore, within this document,
I am questioning the ways in which this can be done with sculpture, and to create a dialogue, not for
the viewer to connect with the specific emotion but rather to open up a space for contemplation of our
interior lives that are often too elusive to share other than through material, abstract and affective works
of art.

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Acknowledgements

Special thank you to my mother, Georgina Izumi Sintnicolaas for the never-ending support and
teaching me this language of making
My dad, Theo Sintnicolaas, for showing me the skills to hone my craft

Special thank you to Dr. Randy Lee Cutler for the endless support and guidance in supervising
this research
I would like to acknowledge that this practice and research has taken place on the unceded
territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

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Appendix

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….5
Emotions, Ceramics, and Fibres…………………………………………………..7
Grounding, Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder

9

Catharsis and Cathexis…………………………………………………………...10
Anxiety

12

Situated Knowledge………………………………………………………….…. 13
Process…………………………………………………………………………... 16
Transmutations………………………………………………………………… 18
Manifest………………………………………………………………… 19
Depression

21

When She Thought There Was a Moment of Hope…………………….. 22
Bodily Trauma

25

Always Growing, Never Healing ………………………………………...26
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...31

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Introduction
“I want you to describe the emotion you are feeling.”
This is one of the first questions asked in order for a doctor, therapist, or social worker—
depending on their own methods—to understand the emotion they are about to undertake. After
being through years of behavioural and trauma therapy throughout my adolescence and early
twenties, I have been asked on multiple occasions numerous ways to describe how I am feeling.
Whether this was during a depressive episode, during a panic attack, a flashback, or else during
the session itself in which I was sitting on the sofa with a pillow on my lap, across from the
therapist. And, despite having different experiences with different therapists and doctors in my
life, whether it was within an office, or a hospital room, or under different therapeutic techniques,
they were all essentially asking me the same things:
“Could you please explain to me where you feel this emotion in your body? Your breathing is very
light, do you feel it in your chest? Your spine? Your stomach?”
“Are you floating right now? I’m going to try to bring you back out of the memory. I need you to
place your feet flat on the floor, and imagine a tremendous amount of weight on the top of your
feet.”
“I want you to close your eyes, and breathe deep, and as you inhale, imagine the air which you
take in to be a beam of positive energy. Imagine it enter through your lungs, and feed into your
veins, your ligaments. Let it nurture your organs, bringing life back into your body. Let your cells
thrive in this breath of air, and feel it as it travels all the way to your fingertips. Can you tell me,
what colour is this energy that’s rejuvenating your body?”
“Can you describe how it felt to tell me that traumatic memory out loud? The act of the memory
leaving your body, did it look like something?”

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These are variations of Visualization Therapy 1, grounding and Metaphor Therapy2,
commonly attributed to various psychological practices to bring the patient out of their distressed
state and to comprehend where the emotion(s) is coming from. Sometimes these techniques consist
of representing an emotion in the form of a metaphor, an image, or an object to create a sensory
experience to remove the patient from their stressful environment.
These were some of my responses:
I’m feeling depressed. I’m feeling like I’m being sucked into a black hole and cannot get out.
I feel most of the pressure in my chest and my throat. It feels like something’s fluttering in my
ribcage and needs to escape, or like a lump that’s constantly expanding in my throat.
My body’s on the couch, but I feel like I’m hovering two feet above that right now.
It looks like honey. Like a bright glowing amber, entering my body and illuminating and warming
everything as it brings life back into it.
Saying that memory out loud felt like I was exhaling a wad of ectoplasm. Or, it felt more like
excising a cyst or a tumour from my throat. It feels like a relief, but the site of excision feels raw,
and needs to be stitched.
When you are able to imagine something abstract like emotions as an image, form or object, it
brings validity to it, and it brings something easy to visualize in order to work on ways to treat it.

1 In her article, psychologist Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner says “Visualization is a cognitive tool accessing imagination

to realize all aspects of an object, action or outcome. This may include recreating a mental sensory experience of
sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch.” Baumgartner, Jennifer. “Visualize It.” Psychology Today,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-dress/201111/visualize-it. Accessed 16 January 2020.
2 Metaphor therapy is a practice of psychotherapy that uses metaphors or symbols to help individuals express their

emotions or situations. The journal article “The Mighty Metaphor: A Collection of Therapists’ Favourite Metaphors
and Analogies” from The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist (2016), vol. 9, demonstrates “the great versatility of
metaphor to address all kinds of issues in therapy and how the shared exploration and collaboration of both client
and therapist generated metaphors can add to problem solving and facilitate therapeutic change.” (S. Killick et al., 4)

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Psychiatrists and therapists have used this treatment when I was diagnosed with Bipolar Type II
and later Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder. It subsequently made me question why is it so difficult
to understand emotion, in a larger, societal perspective. As a result, my research and practice,
informed by these direct experiences consists of taking emotions associated with mood disorders
and mental illness and depicting them in a physical, aesthetic form. I do this to navigate the
emotional terrain of my psyche but also as a means to generate artistic artifacts.

Emotions, Ceramics and Fibers
It is challenging to represent an emotion in a physical form, where the form allows for the
communication of the emotion beyond language. What I am questioning with my practice is what
ways can emotions be transmuted into a physical object and how might this affect the viewer?
And can one induce a sense of empathy from the viewer for a physical form, even if the object is
alien or non-representational? Perhaps, this can all be realized by imbuing an art object with
emotional energy through formal strategies. This expression of emotional energy in material form,
specifically ceramics and textiles are the focus of this thesis project.
My practice is rooted in ceramic sculpture, a material that mirrors the subject matter I am
depicting: emotional trauma and emotions that are difficult to control. Ceramics can be
unpredictable when used for artistic purposes, and its final form relies on structure, luck, and
chemistry. It is an emotional material—it remembers, it cracks under stress, it can explode in the
kiln for specific reasons or for reasons that are undecipherable and unexplainable. It can be strong
and fragile at the same time. You can roll it; wedge it; throw it; compress it; centre it, stretch it—
then send it through its transformative process, by bisque-firing once to glaze, and then firing it
again until it becomes a petrification of the final form. All of these actions are cathartic,
collaborative, and destructive. The process and the material work collaboratively. No other
material really goes through that much transformation in its physical properties. The outcome
which can be beautiful or catastrophic, supports the subject matter of representing difficult
emotional energy and the transmutation of these emotions into a physical form. The metamorphic

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properties of ceramics allow for a gradual transformation and eventual petrification of these
emotions and material into a physically fixed, unchanging object.

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My therapist gave me a rock for my PTSD (Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder)
She told me to squeeze it every time I
-remembered that night
-remembered what he did
-remembered being pinned against the wall
And asked me to feel the roughness of the surface fit perfectly within the folds of my knuckles;
to focus on how the cold surface eventually turned warm with my body-heat,
and how I could feel my pulse eventually form within my fingers

For the past two years,
I’ve been squeezing the rock so hard
every night
that it feels like the rock now has the pulse,
and not me.

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Catharsis and Cathexis
Cathexis is the concentration of mental or emotional energy in one particular object,
person, or idea (merriam-webster.com), while catharsis is the process of releasing repressed
emotions, and therefore providing a sense of relief. The core of my process consists of cathexis,
catharsis, and transmutation. This means directing my emotional energy into a material process,
taking it to its material limits to the point where it is brought to a point of abstraction. For many
years, ceramics was the material with which I conducted this approach, but through MFA research,
I have more recently discovered that my process is not specific to ceramics.
Fibre, like ceramics is very emotive and it has a memory and processes which has the
interesting contradiction of being strong while simultaneously soft and fragile. It is a material
traditionally used to mend, to protect, and to warm, which I believe introduces an important
conversation to the work when juxtaposed with ceramics. It brings in the notion of care for an
object that is harnessing dark emotions.

Working with textiles is different than ceramics,

especially crocheting, knitting, or sewing. It’s something that one must sit and focus on, and do
the same order of movements over and over again. As a practice it feels like the union of both
cathexis and catharsis. According to the online Anxiety Resource Centre “holding the hands
together in front of the body creates a sensation of having a protective ‘bubble’ of personal space
and comfort.”3 It allows the maker to be present and to be within the process of creating an object
through the same necessary repetitive movements. Regardless of what emotion the maker begins
with, due to the concentration it takes when working with textiles, the result is a calm and focused
energy. An interesting note about the etymology of cathexis is “you might suspect that cathexis
derives from a word for ‘emotion’ but in actuality the key concept is ‘holding’…. It can ultimately
be traced back […] to the Greek verb echein meaning to ‘to have’ or ‘to hold’” (merriemwebster.com). I relate this to the role of the hand-made in my practice and the need to work with
tactile materials. My invisible body and gesture, holds just as much value as the material outcome
of the work, therefore, the material and I collaborate through whatever process in order to achieve
the final piece.

3 From “How Crochet and Knitting Help the Brain” https://anxietyresourcecenter.org/2017/10/crochet-helps-brain/

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I am also questioning how a material with protective properties can be used to express
depression and anxiety. To allow a material that is soft and protective, and light to expand to its
limit through a classic technique of repetition (crocheting) allows for a certain tension to form in
the material that inhabits a space between compulsion and absurdity. I believe this material and its
handmade, repetitive process manifests the subject matter and desire to represent emotional
energy. Many artists have adopted familiar practices in their work such as Hilma af Klint, who
channeled unknown forces to collaborate with her to create her paintings, or Eva Hesse when she
used properties of sculptural materials to reflect her own anxieties4; and Alina Szapocznikow’s
work from 1969, where she depicted bodily fragments, were a creative response to her breast
cancer diagnosis in 1969 5. While the ways in which these artists engaged emotional energy
whether through the process, the material of their subject matter is inspiring, I believe that they
have not used tension to the same extent as I do. Song writer and poet Ev Reheard writes “life is
the food we eat. Art is … the shit” (Reheard, 12). In relation to this, I see the creation of art as a
form of regurgitation of emotions and surroundings. The process is driven by the emotions which
are the catalyst and then the work is the cathartic action of representing the emotions through
material form.
This use of tension is not only present in the practice itself, but manifests in this text. I
purposely shift between academic and creative writing, in order to express how these raw emotions
feel, and how they are situated in the body drawn from my own experience. In contrast to the visual
work, where the emotional experience is abstracted, my intent for these writings is to imbue the
reader with a descriptive honesty of how these experiences have felt. While I do my best to make
the work accessible and relatable for others to understand, I can only speak from what I know
through research, and how I have experienced the emotion personally. I also believe, that while
scientific analytics, statistics, and patterns can show how an emotion can feel, sometimes the best
understanding is through the sharing of raw, personal experiences.

4 Lippard, Lucy R,. Eva Hesse. New York University Press. 1976. Print.
5 Filipovic, Elena and Joanna Mytkowska. Alina Szapocznikow Sculpture Undone 1955 – 1972. Museum of Modern

Art. 2012. Print.

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Anxiety—for me, is like batting wings in a small cage, it’s the invisible clock as the seconds-arm
pulses closer and closer to an unknown future. It’s the fight or flight action when there’s still
nowhere to run. It’s the feeling at the base of your sternum, as if a panicked dove with broken
wings is trapped inside your ribcage.
The breath shortens and quickens as your mind speeds through every unbearable possibility
that may or may not happen

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Situated Knowledge
I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, which is situated upon the traditional and unceded
territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. Growing up,
Hamilton was known as “the Armpit of Ontario”, “the Hammer” or “Steel City” due to the
everlasting smog that hovers in the sky from the constant factory pollution, and because it thrived
back in the 1960s – 70s as a working-class trades city in its steel production for the white babyboomers. My parents were not artists, but the act of working with your hands in order to make a
living or as a hobby was heavily instilled in my upbringing, and became an invisible belief system
that I carry with me. My father is an electrician, and my mother who had studied fashion design
was always teaching me some sort of craft from textiles, to drawing, to working with modeling
clay.
Born into a working-class family, the act of manual labour and strenuous processes was
instilled in my body as a means of survival. The action of working with my hands, building
something or pouring concrete was more satisfying to me than an office job—and I believe that
this sensibility has carried into my art practice. Ceramics, textiles, and sculpture are all very
strenuous practices which involves a great deal of pressure and physical activity. You have to be
strong in order to work in these mediums due to the toll it takes on the body. Ceramics, textiles
and sculpture all involve repetitive movement6, hand-eye coordination, heavy lifting, working with
dangerous processes7 and laborious steps. Despite the occasional exhaustion and pain, I have found
the most satisfaction working in these mediums. The amount of labour put into my practice is
cathartic. The end result feels rewarding because it is not only a product of my imagination, but a
product of my body and the materials’ own limits.
These formative years learning by example from my parents’ manual skills and labour was
the beginning of an appreciation for how energy can be transferred into a physical material. Despite
experience in other sculptural materials and techniques 8, ceramics has been my main and preferred
medium due to its malleability, reciprocity, and memory. If you press your finger into it, it will

6 For ceramics: hand-building, wheel-throwing, mixing materials and dry matter; wedging etc. In textiles, various

techniques such as crocheting, knitting, weaving, and embroidery take a toll on the fingers, hands and wrists, usually
causing carpel tunnel and later arthritis.
7 Occasionally these mediums involve working with heavy machinery and hazardous materials depending on the
process at hand.
8 In woodworking, foundry, metal-work; textiles; mould-making, and ceramics

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retain all of the prints’ information even after firing. When you hand-build, you are expanding the
molecules for them to grow into a larger form, when you are wheel-throwing you are compressing
the clay and controlling the directions in which the particles are going in order to evenly create
your vessel or form.
During late adolescence, my mind began to shift between depression and anxiety until the
cycling shifted to hypomania9 and suicidal depression. I was diagnosed with Manic Depression10
by one psychiatrist, however the diagnosis was changed when I was considered to be too “highfunctioning” by another psychiatrist to Borderline Personality Disorder. It is possible for a person
to have both, but this was never confirmed nor denied in my treatment. Then, a few years later
after being the survivor of an assault, I was given the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This was the start of my long-lasting education in the world of mental health, therapy and wellness,
and the realization of how interconnected the mind and body really are as I embarked on my
healing process. It was during this time I realized how difficult it was to navigate the world of
mental health11, and how romanticized having a mental illness is especially on the female
identifying body in North American society and in the media. Christa Parravani refers to this in
her book Her: A Memoir, when she writes “I’d learned over the years that some men like a beauty
with tragedy. A lovely woman with a dark rotten story is like sweetened chocolate with a hardcaramel center that sticks in the teeth” (Parravani, 114). This statement refers to how women with
emotional issues or troubled backgrounds are fetishized by cisgender hetero-men. This is
especially evident in mainstream media. In her New York Times article “Please Stop
Merchandizing Mental Illness: There’s No Way to Make This Pretty”, Rhiannon Picton-James
writes:
“Don’t expect an honest depiction [of mental illness] from television and movies
either. The 1986 movie “Betty Blue” turned men on to a concept of women with
mental illness as impossibly chic, French, and sexually insatiable. More recently

9 Hypomania is a symptom associated with Bipolar Type 2, and is a less severe form of mania. While experiencing

hypomania, the person may experience an elevated mood, feel highly productive, and be high functioning, but
display behaviour that is noticeably different from their typical behaviour.
10 Manic Depression is another name for Bipolar Type 2
11 Usually in order to get in-patient or out-patient treatment through mental health facilities, patients are put on a
two-year waitlist; the answer to your negative emotions are usually prescription drugs and most of the time the side
effects to those drugs can be more detrimental than the disorder being treated.

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the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” which has been commissioned for a third
season, has explored the reasons a pretty high school teen takes her own life from
the point of view of her classmate and colleague, Clay, who is in love with her”
(Picton-James, The New York Times).
I do not agree with Picton-James in the sense that she suggests there are currently no honest
depictions of mental illness or mood disorders in the media, but I agree that the majority of
depictions are glamorized, exaggerated, and inaccurate. In response to the popular representations
of women and mental health issues, I identify my work as a feminist art practice. It is important to
acknowledge that my experience with mental health is from a woman’s perspective. And I believe
that the portrayal of emotional vulnerability in contemporary art can evolve to acknowledge and
address real, lived experience. Too often mental illness has been portrayed through the image of
the “fallen woman”12 or emotionally vulnerable women, through the male gaze, which are sexist
and archaic representations of emotions that do not reflect real experiences. It creates a dangerous
allure to states of mind that are anything but glamorous or romantic.
Something that also should be recognized with portraying mood disorders is that the
experience depends on the person undergoing it. Two people with bipolar disorder may not
experience the exact same symptoms due to their upbringing or experience; those who suffer from
PTSD will always have different triggers 13. I was once jokingly told by a psychiatrist that
symptoms correlated to a mental disorder are like a buy-one-get-seven-for-free discount. You will
likely be treated for one symptom or emotion but also experience numerous others. For example,
people with schizophrenia are mainly treated for the paranoia and the psychosis, but they still
experience depression and anxiety. Those with Anorexia Nervosa, while being treated mainly for
the eating disorder will also experience and be treated for depression and anxiety associated with
their condition while looking into their past to see what lingering experiences may have led to their
condition. Then, those who have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treated for flashbacks will also
experience and be treated for depression and anxiety.
12 Linda Nochlin refers to the use of the fallen woman in her article “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen

Woman” published in 1978.
13 “People as unalike as these examples, while all having a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, may follow slightly
different clinical pathways and vary in their underlying neurological and biological characteristics and causes.
Failing to recognize this can mean more time to find the right type of treatment. This can have severe consequences
for the quality of life of people with the disorder” (Dr. Tamsyn Van Rheenen, theconversation.com).

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There is no way I can make these emotions accessible for everyone to fully understand
their complexities, and while I have experienced my fair share of emotional instabilities, it is
impossible for me to fully represent mental illness. Every experience is different depending on
one’s background, gender, social status, culture, and ability or access to receive help. Mental
illness is a sickness that is too often invisible in our society, and I create artwork in order to bring
some visibility to these hidden concepts and lived experiences.

Process
Most of the time, when I approach the clay, I don’t know what I want to do with it. I feel
like a child looking at play dough, or even mud. That’s all clay is, mud, dirt, silica—and oftentimes
kaolinite, mica, and quartz. Sometimes I have an idea or shape in mind, but I don’t approach the
material with blueprints or sketches to plan out the architecture of the sculpture. I can’t plan until
I’ve touched the material.
Commercial pre-made clay comes in air-compressed bricks. With my knife or wire, I cut
slabs of my desired product, dragging the wire through the clay which slices like butter. I then
slide the slab off the brick and slice more – depending on how many pieces I might need. When
clay has been compressed for commercial use and not made raw from a recipe by the artist, it
usually does not have air bubbles, but I wedge my material anyway to make it more malleable and
elastic. The translation of emotional energy begins here.
Sometimes I feel like it is imagined that when I approach a material, I am feeling the
specific emotion that I want to translate or represent. But this is not exactly the case, and it is likely
best that it stays that way. I don’t necessarily use the clay to represent depression, for example.
Not only do I find depression to be one of the hardest emotions to represent, but when I am feeling
depressed it is usually impossible for me to make myself useful in the studio, let alone able to
know how to depict the emotion that is occupying me. Instead, I consider an emotion, look back
on experiences I have had with that emotion and how I remember it feeling in my body:
Whether it was the rising mushroom cloud of a panic attack….
The intestinal entangling of an anxiety attack…
The raw mental-scab that you want healed from a traumatic memory….

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I think about how they felt, and I start to build on the clay.
Applying my manipulated material on top of itself, I begin the process of building
and building
and building.
This is where I become intertwined with the material. I cannot always put into words where
the process comes from.

Sometimes I imagine it to be this destructive, romantic, emotive scene where I throw the
clay into oblivion; there’s splatters on the studio walls, ceramic shatters; there’s drama, but it is
not as intense as that. In reality, I disassociate, not to the point that I am not present, but my body
goes into an intuitive automatic state that repeats a gesture over and over again onto the material.
Sometimes it has been finger-scratches14, other times teardrop-shaped nodes15. In other materials,
it has been the infinitive slip-knot of wool in crochet16.
I am not suggesting this intuition is coming from a supernatural place, but I can suggest
that it is coming from a deeper internal space somewhere within the subconscious as I think about
these emotions.
At this point, I can assume it must be asked whether this practice art therapy? And my
response is, no it is not. If my practice was anywhere near therapeutic, I would assume my own
emotions would be healed at this point, my hands and body would not be killing me at the end of
the day, and after finishing a piece I would feel a sense of release or relief. If it was a practice of
art therapy, the pieces would be devoted to my own emotions and experience specifically for the
purpose of healing my mental health, which is not the direction I intend. Even though I use my
own experience with an emotion as a starting point, the intent is not to heal myself, but rather to
communicate these concepts that are difficult to describe. Therefore, I see myself as a translator,
attempting to replicate these emotions by hand and then imbedding them in the material.

14 Just an Itch, ceramic sculpture, 2019
15 Manifest, ceramic sculpture 2019
16 Always Growing, Never Healing, crocheted wood and velvet, resin and ceramics, 2019

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The Transmutations
The following are three specific pieces which I consider to be transmutations of mental
energy into a sculptural form. They were created between 2018 and 2020 at Emily Carr University
of Art + Design which is situated on the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish
Peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. During
my studies here, I acknowledge my position as a visitor and uninvited guest on these unceded
lands.
Each of these transmutations resulted in abstracted forms. They appear to be bodily but are
often elusive in their exact references. While I have experimented with representing emotions and
sentiments of depression, anxiety and trauma in more representational forms before, I have found
the concept of affect to resonate more in the tension 17 and process18 of the specific material being
used. When I abstract the work, the form is less literal and more open, allowing the viewer to
connect with it, through the presence of affect. Sarah Ahmed writes “feelings are not about the
inside getting out or the outside getting in, but rather they ‘affect’ the very distinction of inside
and outside in the first place” (Ahmed, 29). Affect is a kind of abstraction of emotion where a
sensation is experienced without being reduced to a specific meaning. This leads me to Wassily
Kandinsky’s thinking on abstracted forms in his paintings when he writes, “form is the outward
expression of its inner meaning” (Kandinsky, 71). I relate this to the need to abstract my work, as
it is representing internal meaning informed by emotional energy.

17 When I’m bringing either ceramics or fabrics to its limits by letting the clay crack, or using the accumulative

stitching of crochet etc.
18 Referring to the repetition of a gesture or technique.

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Manifest
Manifest (fig. 1) is the first work where I attempted to represent an emotion in an abstracted
way. It is a large ceramic sculpture, with a twisting tower of node-like forms, intertwining in

Fig. 1. Manifest, 2019

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different directions, entangling in on itself. There are two different textures—the node-like ones
that appear to be moving in different directions and the smooth intestinal elements which are
evident in small areas of the form and seem to be consumed by the nodes. The surface is glossy,
suggesting a wetness in the light and the colour gradually shifts from a fleshy-pink at the bottom
to purple, blue, and then black at the very top. Are these forms twisting upward, or are they
unraveling downward? I appreciate that it isn’t entirely clear. This work was the first of the
transmutation process, the act of representing an emotion in a material form. The core of Manifest
was coiled to a tower-like form until it could not grow any further without collapsing. The nodes
were added by hand one by one to the structure until it swallowed the majority of the intestinal
coils, suggesting unidentified fingers, or a mass of growths that eventually covered the initial body.
This was the beginning of my collaboration with the material. Considering an initial
emotion as a catalyst and building it into the material structure, I would allow the material to work
with or against me, embedding it with the emotion and allow it to take its own form. When making
this piece I was manifesting and considering the emotion of anxiety. I was reminded of Yayoi
Kusama’s Accumulation sculptures as I worked on this, where she covered sofas, chairs and
ladders in soft phallic forms. In her practice, “like the most basic processes of nature, Kusama’s
plant forms are in a state of continuous multiplication” (Yoshitake et. Al, 23), and what began as
covering furniture in her textures, eventually turned into one of her infinity rooms. In her piece
Phalli’s Field, Kusama used “mirrors as multi-reflective devices, transposing the intense physical
labour that had marked her earlier works—inscribing countless arcs on enormous canvases,
stuffing and sewing hundreds of phalluses—into an instantaneous perceptual experience”
(Yoshitake, et. Al. 23). After considering Kusama’s way of working I began to more fully
recognize the ways in which cathexis and catharsis entered my practice. The act of making over a
thousand clay nodes by hand, and attaching each one piece by piece was one of my first material
explorations of cathexis. I embedded the piece with the energy of the emotion I sought to represent
which was the build-up of an anxiety attack in the body manifesting in a twisting guttural feeling
of that emotion. The emotion reverberated through the directional axes of the sculpture—the
tension in the coiling of forms building upward and the unraveling in a downward direction. What
I later learned in critiques was that although the form was ambiguous, the viewer was able to
connect with its oscillating, anxious energy.

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Depression is the weight
It’s the shard of volcanic rock sinking into the twilight layer after an eruption
It’s the fog that never seems to cease.
It’s not as forgiving as emptiness because at least then, you don’t feel anything. You feel it in your
gut—you feel your sternum being crushed, it feels like led trying to pass through the folds of your
bowls, and you feel it in your limbs as they feel as if they’re 500 pounds.
Sometimes I don’t want to get out of bed.
You say you feel empty inside, but it’s not as fortunate as not feeling anything at all. Under the
spell of depression, you feel so much that it begins to sink you down. You feel every nerve and
every inch of sinew stretch as you sink deeper and deeper into your own void.

But you don’t care.

22

When She Thought There Was a Moment of Hope
The next work I made, When She Thought There was a Moment of Hope, 2019 (fig. 2), a 5ftlong ceramic sculpture, depicts twisting and entangled spirals. It was installed on the floor, lying
horizontal on a white body pillow. The piece has the same entangling spirals that Manifest began
with, but without the nodes encapsulating it. When She Thought There was a Moment of Hope still
has a purposeful ambiguity that allows for the viewer to enter into the work. Unlike its predecessor
which incorporated compressing, coiling, and then modeling the hoard of nodes, the ceramic
element here was made through one process of pulling the clay in the same procedure performed to
create handles for ceramic cups 19, which was then coiled in onto itself.

Fig. 2 When She Thought There Was a Moment of Hope, 2019
19 Pulling a handle is a pottery technique associated with wheel-throwing, in which you introduce water to a certain

amount of clay for your pottery and proceed to stretch it by gently squeezing your hand along the clay, pulling it
downward, stretching it into a handle.

23
The act of cathexis operates in this piece through the concentration of my emotional energy
in one particular object and process. When I had approached the material, I was thinking about the
idea of hope20, and how difficult it can be to experience when you have a mental illness. It can feel
like something you long for so badly can never be reached or achieved. I am not suggesting with
this piece that being hopeful is unrealistic or something optimistic cannot be accomplished, but
rather how the sensation of constant rejection can feel on the mind and body.
I began compressing and coiling the clay on top of itself and repeated the gesture, allowing
the potential for the form to grow into a tall spiraling sculpture…. Until it began to collapse. While
maintaining some of its structure, the coils sank into themselves, creating a buckled version of the
tower I once saw. I allowed the piece to rest, and then performed the same process I had done before:
stretch and coil, and the piece built up itself until it couldn’t any longer and instead it sank. This
emulated the way that hope feels for me physically, it is like a rise of optimism in the body that then
collapses when some desire isn’t realized. As I embedded this sensation into the clay, I had hope
that the process would allow the piece work in my favour – I had hope that it would build onto itself,
but instead it collapsed.
Catharsis functions through the act of bringing this form into a physical space though
repetitive movements with the clay. In this way, I sought to bring an emotion into a physical space
and give it a tangible form. This form is then given a life of its own through the process-based
transformation21 until it finds its final resting place on a body-pillow on a gallery floor. The pillow
reflects a couple things including the feeling of not wanting to get out of bed in a spell of depression,
a hospital pillow on which you rest after surgery, or even a pillow your therapist offers you during
a session. It is a means of both physical and mental support. Similar to what sculptor Louise
Bourgeois does with her work, I intend to instill a sense of familiarity and estrangement with this
piece. It looks bodily, but it also resembles an aspect of the body in pain or in turmoil. However, for
Bourgeois, her art was often a manifestation of her own anxieties.22

20 Hope, noun: a belief that something you want will happen – oxfordlearnersdictionary.com
21 The piece is bisque fired to 1060 degree Celsius to transform the clay from greenware to earthenware. I then used

three different glazes which were glaze-fired to 1222 degree Celsius to change it to stoneware
22 “Her sculptures represented ‘emotional states’ but they had been unemotionally presented and self-contained if
they were to be socially accepted. Her spirals are rational – mathematically correct – constructions however
irrationally compulsive they are. Indeed, they suggest that repetition compulsion is the basis of her compulsive
creativity, or at least one of its ‘motivations.’ It is worth noting that serial Minimalism is compulsively repetitive –
the same feelings in her journals, impulse to repeat a ritualistic experience” (Kuspit, 25).

24
The act of supporting and cushioning this ceramic sculpture on the custom-made body pillow
was my introduction to the possibility of fibre and soft sculpture. It brought the notion of care into
my work that I had never explored before, not only with its final display, but the act of constructing
and hand-stitching the pillow introduced a gesture of mending and comfort. I felt the work needed
a cushion perhaps to protect it. I then noticed an emergent relationship between ceramics and
fabrics, and wanted to explore further how I could bring these two materials together.

25

Bodily trauma—
—the negative memory of some sort of pain inflicted on the body feels different from mental
trauma. Depending on the type of infliction, the sensation in the memory will feel much different.
Physical trauma or injury will feel different than sexual trauma, and—as I’m sure—it differs from
person to person, and—as always—is abstract. For me, who’s experience the latter, Bodily
Trauma starts at the throat, a sensation of expansion I’d imagine that is similar to an allergic
reaction.
It’s hard to breathe.
A numb feeling washes over the body similar to the sensation it had felt when it had been
pinned to the wall….
…Then there’s a gross feeling….
like the stomach reacting to rancid food.
It’s hard to breathe.
The eyes flutter like moths fleeing darkness as the mind tries to get out of the memory. The
body’s frozen, the skin starts to crawl remembering the betraying touch of the flesh.
It’s a weight that’s not the same as the slow, sinking rock as depression; it’s the floor that
unexpectedly dissolves under your feet and sends you spiralling down, only for your eyes to snap
open as you experience impact, waking up from the horrible nightmare that is the repulsive
memory.
Gasping for air, feeling naked inside and out, and all that can be done is to curl up and
hold yourself.
Because it feels like no one else will and no one else can.

26

Always Growing, Never Healing
On December 19th 2017, after surviving an assault, I contracted a staph infection that over
the course of a few hours was fast moving to my brain. Despite the infection being internal, you
could see it travelling
under my skin as a what
looked like a small red
thread that pooled in
some areas. It surfaced
at the back of my neck,
wrapped around me and
then pooled in

my

forehead where it began
travelling

under

my

brow and into my skull.
Delirious and whilst
experiencing a forest
fire inside my head,
upon

obtaining

treatment I had learned
that if I had waited no
more than three more
hours, I would have
become braindead, and
if I had waited beyond
eight hours of infection,
I would have lost my
Fig. 3. Always Growing, Never Healing, first iteration, 2019

life.

While

this

fortunately did not happen, this experience is something that still haunts me and has been looming

27
over my head for the past two years. With the work Always Growing, Never Healing, I wanted to
find a way to represent the raw, invisible wound I continue to feel inside.
When She Thought There was a Moment of Hope introduced the use of fabric and fibres as
a method to bring the notion of care into my practice. I questioned how could I take fabrics and
fibres to its limits and collaborate with the material in the same way as I had with ceramics. Fabrics,
in contrast to ceramics with its material properties of coldness, fragility, and unpredictability, is
more commonly perceived to suggest warmth, strength, protection, and comfort. Therefore, I
wanted to explore if this material could transmute emotions in the same way as I had discovered
working with ceramics.
Always Growing, Never Healing (fig 3.) is an installation depicting a tethered entangled
mass made out of various shades of crocheted red yarn and red velvet growing around encapsulated
ceramic tumour-like shapes and then bleeding into pools of velvet ribbon on the floor. This piece
has had no final form, instead it has continued to grow and expand the entire second year of the
master’s program, and will continue to grow over the years to come. Working with emotions
connected to trauma, I am trying to depict some unidentifiable bodily mass that suggests an entity
that it is bleeding, and scabbed by the resin elements. As with the two previous works discussed,
it is unclear whether the piece is growing into itself or unraveling (fig 4).

28
Trauma is one of those emotions that takes the most toll on the body. A lot of mental health
workers in my own experience, while treating trauma, will ask where in your body do you feel this
traumatic memory? When you suffer from PTSD a lot of the times you feel tension in your chest,
or in your gut and feels equivalent to butterflies in the stomach. This is what I am trying to address
with this installation. There is a suggestion that these materials are tumorous or a disease,
potentially growing inside of the body which has either been excised or has emerged in its own
life form.
Despite the outcome
bordering

between

the

decorative

and

the

grotesque, this was one of
the most laborious pieces I
have ever created (fig. 4).
Catharsis was a beginning
point, while the performative
aspect of the making echoed
the physical and psychic
trauma that informed the
work. The process of slicing
the red velvet resembled a
violent action sustained over
a long period of time. I
noticed how much the velvet
would emulate flesh or skin
when

cut,

with

fibres

holding together like little
Fig. 4 process image of cutting of the first five metres of velvet, 2019

sinews while they also left
red, haunting scars in the

cutting matts.
Cathexis came back into my practice when I began crocheting velvet and wool into organic,
bodily forms that resembled brains, an enlarged cluster of bacteria, as well as intestinal matter.

29
The act of sitting comfortably and crocheting the velvet and wool allowed these materials to grow
into an uncontrollable and obscure shape, letting it mutate in a way. I wanted to question if it was
possible to depict something so dark or emotive like trauma, or bodily trauma with a material that
is usually used to warm, to protect, and to stitch, or to decorate.
Art historian Griselda Pollock refers to trauma as a “personal psychic shattering” (Pollock,
10). When you’ve survived a trauma, specifically to sexual assault, I feel that you become a
different version of yourself. I remember feeling as if every molecule in my body had been
mutated, replaced, and jumbled. In my experience with PTSD, I feel like a wound that has been
stitched and scabbed over somewhere in my body has the ability to constantly rip open and bleed
out the next time I experience a flashback. The use of cathexis in this piece was not meant to heal
myself from my own experience, but instead to transfer this wounded energy into a physical form
in a way that it could depict something that is ambiguously growing or unraveling. (see fig. 6).

30

Fig. 6, Always Growing, Never Healing stage 2, 2019

Always Growing, Never Healing is made entirely out of red material with exception to some of
the ceramic elements. I relate this to the artist Claire Ziesler who is known for frequently incorporating
the colour red into her installations. She works with the colour as if it is a medium itself. She writes, “I
adore red. It says structure. It says vibrancy, life. I think I must dream in red…. To me, it’s a
constructive colour. I don’t think I really use it as a colour” (Taft, et al. 266). I work with the colour
red in this piece to point to its bodily energy whether flesh or blood. While slicing the velvet and

31
draping the hanging elements, I thought of how in operas, whenever a character was eviscerated, the
blood would be represented as red ribbon. Scott Bucklow writes, “According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the word ‘blood’ may share its origins with the word ‘bloom’. Roses bloom, but the
technical term for the iron that flows from haematite (or ‘blood stone’) in the furnace is also ‘bloom’”
(Bucklow, 132). This offers an interesting expansion to the concept behind this piece, as it is ambiguous
whether it is intertwining or unraveling; whether it is dying or growing; bleeding or thriving. It is very
similar to how it feels when living with the state of mind that it is representing. A lot of art can be
compared to this idea, once again returning to the thought of art as a regurgitation or a petrification of
emotions. I can relate this to how Frida Kahlo represented her chronic pain and emotional turmoil in
her self-portraits, or that Ross Bleckner’s paintings from 1986 onward were “a response to the AIDS
crisis. Later paintings also manifest his sense of loss stemming from the disease” (Guggenheim.org).
Francesco Goya’s Disasters of War drawings were a representation of the political devastation around
him, and even Louise Bourgeois’ work was an embodiment of her emotional turmoil from her
childhood and complicated relationship with sexuality. All of these artists’ work stemmed from inner
or outer trauma. Similarly, my work exists as an artefact of turmoil and tumultuous emotional energy.

By way of a conclusion
Often abstract, challenging emotions and mental illness are fertile subjects to work with
especially when they are widely misunderstood. Shifting difficult emotions from the body into the
three-dimensional realm of ceramics and textiles allows for both a personal and aesthetic
transformation. Working with subjects like mental illness, emotions, and anxiety, and transmuting them
into the physical realm brings attention to their material forms within the public sphere. The process of
working with difficult emotions coupled with a longstanding investment in physical labour and
repetition has proven to be a source of personal artistic inspiration. With that said, I need to highlight
that this is a difficult challenge, because I want to acknowledge that there will never be a concrete form
to depict how trauma and mental illness feels, particularly because it is important to recognize how
these experiences can differ and shift from person to person. How I have experienced my personal
trauma will not be the same as how one might have felt from a similar experience, or to someone who

32
has survived political trauma, or domestic trauma etc. However, as I move forward with my practice,
I will embrace the value in acknowledging these emotional vibrations by bringing them to the public
sphere in order to create a dialogue, and an empathic atmosphere. Displaying this work in a gallery
setting allows for the subject matter to be made available beyond a therapeutic context through
aesthetically charged forms. These iterations are important. With stigma, representation and knowledge
around mental health constantly changing, offering artworks that take up this subject will engage more
current representations to reflect the shifts and affects in clinical diagnosis. I will be pursuing this with
ceramics and fibre sculpture, as well as exploring how other mediums in visual art and creative writing
can be used to convey these ideas. I have found my voice through the use of a certain rawness in
language, material, and visual sensibility in order to bring aesthetic form to these emotional vibrations.
This way of working is not about the viewer connecting with the specific trauma but rather opens up a
space for contemplation of our interior lives that are all too often too elusive to share other than through
material, abstract and affective works of art. As I continue to add more red hyperbolic crochet into my
installation over the years to come, its form will grow and change, sometimes becoming more
monstrous and sometimes becoming more beautiful. Sentiments will fade, wounds can be stitched, and
infections will disperse…
But that doesn’t mean they didn’t once exist.
And that doesn’t mean they cannot be acknowledged and better understood.

33
Work Cited
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Besant, Annie and C.W Leadbeater. Thought-Forms. Percy Lund, Humphries & Co.
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Museum of Modern Art. 2012. Print.
Gugenheim. Ross Bleckner, 2020, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/ross-bleckner.
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34
Works Consulted
Besant, Annie and C.W Leadbeater. Thought-Forms. Percy Lund, Humphries & Co.
LTD. 1901
Elderton, Louisa, and Rebecca Morrill. Vitamin C: Clay + Ceramic in Contemporary Art. Phaidon
Press. 2017.
Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams. Graywolf Press, 2014. Print.
Kayson, Susannah. Girl, Interrupted. Turtle Bay Books. 1993. Print.
Kuspit, Donald. “Louise Bourgeois in Psychoanalisys with Henry Lowenfeld.” The Return of the
Repressed. Violette Limited. 2012. Print.
Middleton-Wagner, Anne. Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture. Yale
University Press. 2005. Print.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books. 2009. Print.
Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2011. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press. 2005.
Parravani, Christa. Her: A Memoir. Picador, Henry Holt and Company, 2013. Print.
Piction-James, Rhiannon. “Please Stop Merchandizing Mental Illness: There’s No Way to Make
This Pretty.” The New York Times, July 28 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/style/anxiety-necklace.html. Accessed 30 January
2020.
Pollock, Griselda. After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the
Virtual Feminist Museum. Manchester University Press. 2013. Print.
Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Random House. 1990. Print.
Van Rheenen, Tamsyn. “People diagnosed with the same mental illness can be different, and
research must address this.” The Conversation. October 3rd 2017.
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Tuttle, Richard et. Al. Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language. Tate
Publishing. 2014. Print.