“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” — C. G. Jung
How much of an artist’s iconography emerges as a deliberate or unconscious process, and how might this impact the development of the artist themselves?
Are there any symbols or images that have recurred across your life that have helped provide insight beyond the rational mind?
Artist Tanja Stark’s work centres around themes of Suburban Gothic and the Sublime Divine, her iconography exploring the mysterious dimensions of the psyche, and the dynamic interplay between the destructive and creative, the visceral and cerebral, and the numinous.
Jung believed recurring mythopoeic symbolism and imagery found across cultures in art, myth and religion, drew from the collective unconscious and could provide pathways to greater integration and wholeness; while repression, denial or unbalanced inflation of unconscious energies could result in pathology, illness and disintegration. Intrinsically understanding the transformative power of creative expression after his own Red Book experience, (prefiguring the rise of Art Therapy), Jung advised patients with disturbing dreams and visions, to express them through the arts, to help process their experience .
“It is of great help …to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their ‘mythology.” C.G JUNG
Tanja will explore the organic and sometimes mysteriously synchronistic ways archetypal symbolism emerges in her artist practice, reflecting and shaping her own journey and development, as well as broader ideas around the importance of symbol in arts and culture.