One evening, two year ago when I first moved into my current London location I began pulling wallpaper off the ceiling of the bathroom in order to re-decorate. I was a listening to music and was in a relaxed state of mind. As the paper began to peel off I noticed a small hole in the concrete ceiling, I continued to peel away the wallpaper from around this hole, and an image began to emerge in my mind stimulated from the pattern left behind which to me suggested a creature of sorts. The image which emerged from my unconsciousness into my conscious perception was that of something similar to (yet quite different from) a giant rabbits' head! As my sense perceptions had interpreted it thus, I obviously felt an immediate connection to the image, as in some way such instances are nearly always connected to the inner self.
Aesthetically, I liked the way the "pointy bits" (special art language term) jut forwards at an angle. It looks similar to a large rabbit head but my intuition tells me it is something different, an image of creature (that's how I perceived it initially) that I feel an automatic affinity with. Maybe it is a manifestation of my creative self in some form of animal guise which is intended to facilitate my creative process, or maybe it is just a few random lines of old wallpaper.
I returned to the image some weeks later with some art materials to further experiment, and found myself painting a collar around it's neck which I attached visually around a small pipe coming out the wall, and painted a large speech bubble from its "closed lips" as if the image was about to say something. Just another one of my self-initiated art therapy sessions I thought, and left it for a few more weeks to incubate in my unconscious.
Of course, I can never truly be sure why I perceived an image of giant rabbits head in a few scraps of wallpaper, but this is how the mind works. We have an inner "Gestalt" which try to impress upon random chaos and confusion and sense of order to things, our minds are somehow constructed to interpret things as a whole from the individual parts. But why does it chose to see a rabbit? Probably because this is the closest thing in my unconscious memory that resembles the shape on the ceiling. My mind can only make a "whole" sense of an unknown image by dredging my past perceptual experiences and connected it the most likely thing it knows.
As I'm trying to observe and understand my own creative un/consciousness I am therefore trying to study myself. But how can I separate myself from own subjective conscious processes? How can I possible be objective, about my own subjective experiences?. Is this is even possible?I imagine people who meditate, Buddhist monks for example must be going through a similar process of losing oneself in the unconscious or non-conscious, in order to discover the truth of oneself.
"I think, Therefore I am" (Descartes)
Creative Notes:
Once the image of the large rabbit appeared in my mind my memories of the film "Donnie Darko" not unsurprisingly surfaced almost immediately after. A great film, one I completely loved, my first reaction to watching that film was "genius". Of course it could be that we are all so used to to watching standard Hollywood interpretations of life on screen when something distinctly unusual comes along we are truly amazed and stunned by it, nevertheless I thought it was a beautiful piece of work, along with films such as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Tolerance of ambiguity and an attraction to complexity are known characteristics of creative personalities.
I believe the rabbits' neck collar attached to the pipe means I unconsciously feel I am not yet completely free, like most people, I am a form of prisoner, a lab-rabbit perhaps, attached to a means of economic restraint in the social laboratory of life, a friend of mine recently set up a course around issues of the slave trade in London (See Platform web Link). Maybe some of us have remnants of those horrific experiences lingering in our deep unconsciousness passed onto us through distant, (and not so distant) ancestors. I find the whole area of investigating the human mind, and the scientific enquiries into DNA fascinating, and yet slightly worrying at the same time.
According to Jungs theory of the "collective unconscious" we all have an "Anima" or a "Animus" and maybe I think this giant rabbit-like creature is mine! I shall do some more research on Jung and my giant rabbit and then come back to this.
What I do know, is that at some point I feel as though I will make a model of this giant creatures head from chicken wire and paper-mache, because for some unearthly creative reason I feel I want to experience what its like walking around the streets of London with a giant rabbits head on, only I know that its not really a rabbit. I'm sure Joseph Beuys and the Surrealists would approve.
