Below is a bit of analysis that I posted to my socials a few days ago. It pertains to my newest series, whose title currently is “Liminal Horror”.
At what point do fear and loneliness intersect? I don’t mean fear of loneliness, I mean at what point do the distinct feelings overlap, empower one another synergistically, and at what point do the colors of each become new and more vibrant than before? Is it a place that inspires that? Where even the corny motifs of blood streaks and splatters become something less flatly semiotic? Some new symbol? A piece of a death alone in an alien place. I don’t think it’s loneliness you fear in places like this. I don’t think it’s monsters, or death itself, or even the unknown. What’s terrifying is discomfort. So extreme, so emotionally evocative that it threatens to break your mind with each passing moment, always building like the echoes of ripples on a pond. A pain that can’t be called pain, not in any physical sense, but a visceral curdling of the blood, a bodily implication of eternity with pins and needles. That’s just a metaphor though. I think that exploring my struggles with OCD and depression I found more often than not that what I attach to my ‘fears’ is disquiet, the signs and signifiers of isolation more than the isolation itself. I become afraid of the motifs, those hyperreal agonies that dig at the heart. And so that’s what this series is. It’s not only the construction of spaces that evoke those types of fears, but a visual representation of the existential nausea that comes with them. I’ve attempted to make something new from something old. Blood, monsters, and liminal spaces; all turned to unreal, and maybe hyperreal, versions of themselves, faded into the corners of uncomfortably familiar spaces, where you’ve never been.
I thought I might refine this a bit and explain what my thought process was.
So, I think that with any art series some proportion of the meaning is only known to the artist through the process of completion, or in the case of ongoing series it is an ongoing process. What started as an exploration of space, light, and shadow became a series that to me was representative of the underlying fears of my own illness. I began to see how the patterns of my fears, affected by pop-cultural signs and signifiers, were imprinted into the work that I was making.
To get more granular here we can break down each motif. Liminal spaces, that is to say transitional spaces, have taken on a life of their own in the “meme” zeitgeist. There is a sense of dread, nostalgia, weirdness (in a sort of “weird fiction” sense) that have retroactively redefined the tone of many previously undefinable images. Targeting this tone is crucial to unlocking the signifiers of the genre, which is probably a bit obvious.
The next motif, we’ll just call it ‘monsters’. There are certainly creatures depicted in this series, which is a departure from lots of successful ‘liminal’ media. And in fact, there is a sentiment that specifically denies the use of creatures in constructing this atmosphere. A famous example being the internet based media ‘the Back Rooms’, for which much online criticism is aimed at people who seek to systemize the spaces into floors and themes, and populate the spaces with named creatures. Much of the mystery, and therefore the core weirdness of the concept is lost when an official systemization is published. This is consistent with what we know of weird fiction, and particularly Lovecraftian horror as well. The more you seek to establish “known” variables, the less fearsome much of the world-building becomes.
So why include creatures then? Well, I’d like to say that there was some intention of subversion. The truth is that I began by drawing a creature, “Vampires of the Interstice” was the first piece. The key is to construct a thing that has as much of an open-ended concept as the mysterious spaces it inhabits. Or that was retroactively my goal. As I continued the series, if I was to include more creatures I wanted them to carry on the torch of the mystery that had been inadvertently injected into the vampire figure of the first piece.
Lastly, the blood. There’s lots of it in this series. Almost every image has blood in it. Streaks and splatters galore. As stated above, I don’t believe that it’s blood that causes fear. I think there is a mysterious connotation of danger. But it’s a fear that isn’t necessarily the danger itself. The problem is that you are denied safety in this realm. There is no certainty, there is no guarantee of consistency. Rules are broken, gravity seems to be defied by nature of the space, the potential for any wall to open up and swallow you, or produce hands to drag you into oblivion or some further abstracted space is constant.
In “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski, the appearance of the Minotaur, and in fact the very implication of it’s existence is a shining example of what one can do with this sort of motif. There isn’t much to fear except for a rumbling, but the real danger presents itself in the fear, paranoia, and madness of you or your companions. I’ll leave it at that as to not spoil the book for anyone. And it should be obvious that the text itself is VERY open to interpretation. So take what I’ve said with a grain of salt.
So what does all of this have to do with OCD?
Well certainty is the name of the game. It’s the core mechanic behind each compulsive action. I can never be sure the door is locked unless I lock it 5 times, and I can’t be sure my hands are clean unless I bleach or boil them, and I can’t be sure that I am going to be okay because I can’t trust my own mind, so I have to seek reassurance.
Do you feel, that in the spaces I’ve constructed, that if you had the chance, you would seek out a voice of reason? Some wise or all-knowing explorer of this dreadful, sometimes sterilized realm? A person you could ask for help, not in the way of what to do, or any specific act, just a bit of information? Systemized denial of your comfort is what it’s all about. I won’t give you reassurance, because I can’t have it. That’s the key to the spaces like this.
OCD is like living constantly in the hands of unknowable danger. It could be anything. And sometimes it manifests with sickening clarity, that a specific creature could reach out and kill you, but most of the time it is a constant buzzing dread that encircles you, drives out your senses, and denies you the certainty of knowing and experience.
To conclude. It might not have been my intention when I first sketched “Vampires of the Interstice” that all of this would come through. It is only by the process of painting, analyzing, over-thinking, and self-exploration that I found that the work I was making was more representative of my feelings and experiences than I thought.