- Énoncé de l'artiste : Elaine Amyot

"Episode - Summer 1992"

The episode began at 5:30 p.m. on June 30th 1992, at the corner of Highfield and St.George streets, Moncton.

It was a sharp, clear, split-second picture -- of a man holding a garbage bag in one hand an a pregnant woman with the other.

This image replayed itself painfully and obsessively in me all summer.

I began to speculate about the contents of the garbage bag. Robert Bly in The Little book on the human Shadow, describes our shadow as a large bag filled with unacknowledged parts of ourselves and parts given us by our parents and our community. He mentions that when a man and woman are in a relationship, there is also an encounter with the man's witch -- given him by his mother and the woman's giant -- a present from her father.

I made 25 charcoal drawings of the imagined contents of the garbage-shadow-bag. At first the bag was seen to hold in turn, penises and skulls, snakes and then heads. At last and image of a man with crossed arms predominated to become that of my father - giant. It connected with a past father-daughter relationship.

To heal the pain of not-forgetting, a ceremony was held on Sunday, September 27th, 1992 at 2:00 p.m. The ceremony took place in the presence of a giant on one wall (this was a projected image of my father, smiling and holding his 2 year-old daughter), and the image of a woman on the other. There was a small black snake emitting green light coiled around her right arm and she was releasing a green veil - a veil that had once represented a chrysalis.

The participants who had been invited to observe their pas and to unite of its joys/sorrows or to create objects as symbols of these experiences; read their texts and those written by visitors. We proceed to take down my texts concerning the episodes, from a wall, to carefully tear all texts and to place these along with objects, seeds, flowers, herbs, shells in a basket. This material is now composting and will help blue flowers grow next summer. We will share the flowers grown from a "collective-past".

- AMYOT, Elaine


  retour à la liste