healing the split
These diptychs were created to explore my lived experience of one calendar year, 2020 - 2021. They represent my daily movement upon the external landscape of my temporary island home in relationship to the internal landscape of my psyche. There was a synchronicity that arose in the pairing of these two images: "outer and inner events collide in significant ways that open us to perceive what C. G. Jung calls the unus mundus, a wholeness where matter and psyche are revealed to be but two aspects of the same reality". Jung believed that the infinite, psychic field of the unus mundus suggests that "the world itself has a soul and all phenomenon within it are ensouled". Perhaps these are in fact images of presence rather than absence. The image reaching to remind us of the intersections inherently found between each of us and of the human and other-than-human worlds. (6/2021)(to read expanded text with references sourced see link: https://www.debragoldmanstudio.com/writings )
(all diptychs are 20"x29"(image size) archival pigment prints on rag paper, 2021 limited editions are available)
“...I found myself in a small sailboat on a wildly disturbed sea. In the boat I found a sphere. It was in the inside of the boat, and I had to bring it to safety..." ~ C.G. Jung, conversation with Angela Jaffe, Erlebtes un Gedachtes bei Jung
"Someone standing at the mouth had the idea to enter. To go further than light or language could go. As they followed the idea, light and language followed like two wolves - panting, hearing themselves panting. A shapeless scent in the damp air...Keep going, the idea said." from The Cave by Paul Tran
"Mute acceptance grounds a woman's person in the deep soil of collective identity with other women, and portrays her in the rich symbolic colors and textures of the primordial feminine...In deepening the roots of her self ~ she can work at the task of bringing together in herself what is split in the world." ~ Ulanov, The Witch and The Clown
"In creation myths, islands portray the beginnings of consciousness, small, vulnerable bits of earth fetched up from the bottom of the cosmic sea that are easily re-submerged...it can also express the unforeseen, inviolable space where the treasure of the self is found." ~ ARAS, Island
"Bring this dark guest into your home. Befriend her, if you can. And if you cannot, maintain a correspondence. In dark days and dark moments, her dark words may be all that is audible, leading you out of the arid desert and back to water." ~ C. Morse, Soul and Soil, Reanimating a Desecreted World
"As the needle of a compass jumps back to its origin, so to do we return to the beginning, changed by the stream of time, by a self experienced as a thou." ~ E. Blass, Proof of the Daimon
"Some day, if you are lucky, you'll return from a thunderous journey trailing snake scales, wing fragments and the musk of Earth and moon." ~ G.M. Haugen, from The Return
"I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." ~ W. Whitman, Leaves of Grass
"In the middle of our life journey I found myself in a dark wood. I had wandered from the straight path. It isn't easy to talk about it: it was such a thick, wild, and rough forest that when I think of it my fear returns..." ~ Dante, Inferno, Canto I
"All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of the primordial night. There he is still whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from Nature..." C.G. Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
"And the end of our exploring...will be to arrive where we started... And know the place for the very first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate." ~ T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding