Interview with the model - Image collaboration
Model17p3
Model: I’ve been working on shadow integration, and part of that is recognizing the areas of my life that make up my past, part of which is my Christian upbringing. I would like to explore the crucifixion of Christ through an image with you.
Coner: I try to stay away from religious images for several reasons, partly because religions and religious figures are an easy target for misinterpretation.
Model: I can see where a Christ image might be construed as cliché, but the reason I want to replicate it is so I can address that part of my shadow, since it’s a big part of who I am, and it’s become a fragmented part of my personality. If I embrace it, what it’s been to my life, how it’s contributed to me being who I am today, then I can move past it.
Coner: Sort of like my process of recreating scenes from my past into images so I can release them.
Model: Yes, exactly. By reliving the crucifixion of Christ through the act of art, it’s a process that frees me, it allows me to let go of the thread of my Christian upbringing which has been a heavy element in my life for as long as I can remember.
Coner: What if we do something like you taking a knife to your nipple to symbolize sacrificing your feminine charm to release the binds of beauty which is the focus on looking beautiful, a polished female image that caters to humanity because that’s what the young female is expected to be in societal norms.
Model: I think there are multiple elements we can represent here. Using barbed wire will symbolize the thorns of the binds, the binds which I felt held me back from growing into the independent female I could become as suggested by modern society. However, the expectations of a young woman in my patriarchal Christian home was to cook and clean, bear children, worship God first, my husband second, and whose main role was to be a caretaker for the family in a way that supported the Christian ideal. By living that life, I’d be carrying out the ideals of their Christ, which would support me in times of need (hence the strength of the metal binds), but the barbs on the wire indicate the bitter sweet realization that my dreams of an autonomous woman must be given up.
Coner: I was also thinking the choice to self-castrate the nipple symbolizes letting go of societal expectations as one matures into a woman, ready to take on the world from a self-realized perspective. She is letting go of beauty and charm and the lure of the feminine through sexuality, into a womanhood empowered by her self-actualization of personal development.
Model: I’ve been exploring the philosophy of dark emotions and a psychological technique for letting go of such thoughts is playing the thought out as fully as possible, writing them down, what would happen if we follow through, all of which creates order in our mind and helps us contemplate the thoughts for what they really are. Then we can begin to understand what they tell us about ourselves. A Buddhist technique is to label the thoughts, write them down and then throw them away, which gives us a sense of control over them. A believe that most of us can relate to is that suppressing such thoughts is like chopping off the hydras head, do it and a myriad more pop up in their place.
Coner: So through art, we’re recreating those thoughts, living through them and acting them out, which you then can let go of.
Model: Exactly, to me the process of creating this image is symbolically giving respect to that part of my life through awareness, acknowledging and appreciating what it brought, suffering through the various phases, immortalizing it forever through the art, then letting go of the bittersweet binds that provided a supported and sheltered environment for me to grow into who I am, while simultaneously preventing me into developing my own ideals of what it means to be a real-realized woman.