Exploring BPD through ART

June 6, 2010

Back in November I decided to go NC with my nada. It was very difficult at at

times I would want to run back but knew that it would be futile.

A friend forward me an email that was about doing collage to explore yourself

in a visual context. I decided to do this for a month. Fortunately I had

already cut out a lot of pictures, so I was prepared. I had thought about doing

collage soul cards over a year before this so this is why I had a lot of visuals

to draw upon. I found it very beneficial and validating.

At first the goal was just to pick three images and place them together and

then see what they said to you. I remember one of the images that I picked out

was a woman holding a child. When I turned it over there was an empty chair

....it was a picture out of a magazine but it just happen to suggest that that

was something that I wanted but the reality was that there was no one there to

hold me. I named that card WANT.

I also did a lot of representation of my mother as a spider....always drawing

me into her web.

Today I was reading about Louise Bourgeois,

" In 1997 Bourgeois exhibited a cage upon which was perched an enormous spider

sculpted in bronze, its legs completely covering the wire enclosure. For some

years she had been drawing and sculpting spiders, both friendly and ominous.

All, she claimed, represented her feelings about her mother. In one 1994 sketch,

in the red ink she associated with blood, was titled Spider (L'Indispensable).

Indispensable was a word she frequently used about her mother: " My best friend

was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable,

dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider… I shall never

tire of representing her. "

But indispensable can also mean inescapable. Maman (1999), the gigantic spider

in her installation at Tate Modern, towers over us, the mother as colossus,

woman as weaver and spinner of stories. "

I wonder if others have done this and if you would like to share your

experience.

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