The search for "self" in a fragmented mind

Abstract

The reason for making art goes beyond a desire to pictorially represent a chosen subject. The subject and the production methodology chosen to present it, are to art, what scaffolding is to a new building; a necessary means to an end, but to me at least, not an end in and of itself. I contend that when we produce art, we instil into it some aspect of ourselves, a fragment of our psyche that we cannot describe. We know it only by its presence, which can only be detected through the nature of our response to visual or other sensory stimuli. This response is characterised through the way it makes us feel, yet the causal chain of these feelings is always absent. This paper seeks to define the source of these emotional responses and to explain why we can have no cognition of the events that prompt them, and further, using the work of a range of artists, as well as my own, to ponder how this aspect of our personality becomes embedded in our art.