2014 Jan Cleveringa- "Who?"
Acrylic Paint, Bones and Resin on Canvas,
62 x 62 x 4cm
I have rejected my usual approach to painting for a more installation type work using uncomfortable materials in a passionate way about my spiritual experience through depressed eyes. Depression a has been exposed using a ghastly experience being expressed through somewhat ghostly and disturbing material. Nothing can be more naturally insecure than to expose deep horrible feelings of despair, loss and contradictory hope in the conundrum of depression.
The stigma, the discrimination about mental health, and the commonality of the illness in our growing society. The emotional realities like switching realms allows for a changed spiritual perception and for life changing different views. An experience, hard to share in intensity.
In this work, I collected these bones for over a year from chickens that I ate whilst thinking about this work, unsure of what would result or if I would use them. I just needed to collect them. Each bone having been in my mouth and their flesh ingested symbolise the organic human needs like hunger, love and morbidity raising the big faith questions of "Who am I and why?" Hence, feeding off the flesh of animals and the normal but ritualistic time taken to do this provide a disturbing recognition and almost urky realisation of the human condition for the viewer. Perhaps a small glance into the similar disturbed condition of depression.
Here, open to different interpretation, the organic machine is broken like a machine wheel or human egg where intense emotions and spiritual awakenings/feelings come and go in a snapshot of a tide of glassy black like water washing against bones in an ebb and flow movement. An intuitive way of making art.
