Published by Maija Liepins
Australian born, mixed-media artist, Maija Liepins focuses on the sensory and emotional experience in her visual dreamscapes. Repetitive actions such as dream journals or collecting visual impressions with her mobile phone generates material with which to reveal the subtle, ‘underneath’. Maija’s drawings and films allude to a symbolic mythology as if the intangible substance of dream is a material as real as ink and clay. Her practice is driven by a pursuit of freedom - to express, to create, and to collaborate without inculturated inhibition.
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The Panopticon offers us the idea of free space, its used in schools and colleges, but mainly in prisons…….
I shall look it up!
i love the interpretation of hair, so much written into what we look like, how we look, even the colours are historical and controlling, DNA is coded within just as words…
Your thoughts flowed Maija, like the hair you created, like the water you were surrounded by.
The thoughts were fragile, easily broken maybe, or changed, or damaged. Fragility in our thoughts. As people or artists. Be careful with these you are saying. They are mine.
I really enjoyed this interpretation, thank you!
Thank you for your comments!
This reminds me of some work I did with a PhD student who was exploring feminine archetypes in Fairy Stories, and was acting out elements of the stories, then reflecting through writing, collage etc. All part of her work in Organisational Change. Through the play which she set in parts of her local environment, she was able to deconstruct her understanding of ‘the feminine’ in the stories we grow up with and allow to inform our adult lives, and to ‘re-story’ (borrowed from your other post!) her role within the workplace. It was fascinating to get a glimpse of that at work.
Amazing! Do you remember her name?
It’s funny, organisational change was totally what I was interested in pursuing before my CAS life, I developed a full holistic system, but didn’t have the energy to take it further. It makes me wonder what the connection is between the two, and then I remember that I know what it is.
Systems.
An organisation is a system of relationships and ideas, with a tangible output of activity or production that has value to other people. The value, meaning and concepts within the system need to be alive in both the talking of the talk (marketing) AND the walking of the walk (culture) in order for the ecosystem of the organisation to be healthy, and a healthy environment for the people inside it.
The Laboratory of Dissent offers the same possibility of critiquing formalised structures within society, cultures, communities, and our psyches and creating self-organised avenues for change.
Fairy stories deal with the symbolic language of the psyche/soul, abutting culture and society but living mainly in the collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness. The motifs and symbols and structures of the stories may change with the times but retain their potency somehow as ingredients for stirring the heart, mind, and soul. As a subject of study folklore and fairytales are a symbolic system of meaning where the imagery is more important than the exact words used.
My method of study through art and living has actually been through dream journals. I’m interested in MY relationship with the motifs, me being ‘modern’ and ‘current’ because I am here, and able to speak for how these motifs present in my life. My individuality allows for alternative meanings to emerge, and hopefully at some point contributing something new but familiar that is of value to other people. For me, the fairytale enables me to study the structure of the psyche, my own and the collective, the ‘map’ I am building, if indeed that is what I am doing, is of the pathways through the forest overlaid and read through the landmarks of THIS life not the lives of the original tellers.