Behind her, I was trying to accord my look so closely to hers that, with every passing second, I began to remember her memories.[1]

 I made the artwork Ties that Bind (2010-2012) to narrate an intergenerational experience of trauma, knowing that catastrophic loss could profoundly impact the way that visioning takes place in the subject. The subsequent use of the work as case study to investigate psychoanalyst/artist Bracha L. Ettinger’s notion of the feminine gaze and its implications for transformation[2] proved highly instructive. It involved a practise of ‘weaving’ both art and theory together to produce new signifiers from the specific kinds of non-cognitive knowledges that the processes of art-making facilitate.[3]

In her radical re-theorising of the role of the feminine, Ettinger offers another way of thinking about the gaze when she contrasts ‘fascinance’ – an aesthetic state of relatedness arising from the archaic feminine or ‘matrixial sphere’ – with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the ‘fascinum’ as the unconscious element within an image which arrests life. She considers that when abrupt separation or split occurs, fascinance may turn into fascinum[4].

Using Ettinger’s ideas allows a reading of Ties that Bind as both a manifestation of, and simultaneous shift in, the gaze as unconscious response to trauma. Looking at the artwork through fascinance’s diffused and affective mode allows new, formerly invisible, links to be traced between the seemingly most significant elements of the artwork and those not intended as centrally important. This suggests that in the making and reading of art a transformative relationship to unconscious knowledge – particularly that of the archaic feminine – is possible. As Ettinger suggests, through allowing new ‘links’[5] to be made and read, art may ‘untie’ psychic ‘knots’ or strictures of repressed pain in the subject and thus hold open the possibility of transformation.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]The artwork under discussion ‒ an installation which describes the beginning of a child’s life and the rending of its future ‒ comprises two elements. Substrate, a long vitrine, holds a de-constructed, re-created photograph album, evoked through paintings and found and made objects. Mother I-VII, a cycle of paintings of a baby and her caretakers, as well as a textual sign, hangs at eye level above, looking out. The narrative beneath concludes with a disembodied eye. The narrative above concludes by declaring:  True Love Never Dies.

What does the viewer first look at, for, and into? Their reading begins with the closed album in the vitrine. Pages are thereafter played out in multiple horizontal formats with sequence implied. Adhering or resting on the grounds of varied papers, coarse or fine, are painted images of the album’s photographs, identical in scale and pose. The images depict a couple and their infant baby, loving and touching and mutually gazing.

These forensically re-painted photographs permit entry into the frozen and suspensive time – both past and ever present – that trauma lodges in the psyche of the subject, revealing, through the repetitively descriptive,[6] the use of sight as an attempt to master unbearable psychic pain. Obsessively reworked, the photographs through which one visually moves to reach the artworks’ final form – an eye-like sphere – speak to the fascinum, which, as unconscious object a born of rupture, holds arresting power.[7]

Found objects suggestive of retrieval – as ‘real’ as the re-made photographs whose sequence they destabilise as the chronology plays out – are placed at the exact centre of the glassed installation; the earlier flickering register of grey and buff and sepia tones through which the viewer has been transported shift into larger, starker shapes of tonal extremity – primitive grounds of black and white on which these objects lie. Drawing on the binary terms of the phallic[8] – absence or presence, like or as – for the associations they invite, these objects communicate through metaphor and metonymy. Thus a found folded pad of sandpaper, used, resting within multiple grounds of darkness, evokes other smaller, interior tales of identity lost; a reversed page of black carbon paper faintly numbered calculates a multiple cost; on another gritted, abrading surface a doomed shape’s irrevocable insistence looms.

Beyond this determining moment the narrative disrupts itself, falters, stammers.[9] The images repeat brokenly, seeking to redeem earlier, more comprehensible experience. A thicker book offers up a shard, a fabric scrap. Effaced faces describe sites of holding now evacuated, the baby howls in the box-like pram. A glass phial holds tiny teeth and fate’s toy dice. Dis(re)membered, a child’s head tops a scaffold, a gauze-like shape is rent asunder. Dots circumnavigate a hidden heart visible beneath the full stop of an eye. This eye – omnipotent symbol of the punitive, savage superego which may arise from trauma, attacking relatedness and psychic linking[10] – bears witness to its own destruction. Is this the only possible ending? How might the fascinum’s dominance shift, persecutory pain transform? [11]