Jessica Serran believes that art is an act of becoming. For the past 15 years she has used drawing, painting and social practice to make visible parts of Self and Other that are hidden and hardest to touch – memory, trauma, the past, identity, desire. She believes that by touching these places and going into the darkness we find the alchemical gold.
“All my life I could never shake the feeling that there were things that needed to be said that weren’t. I’ve always been drawn to the unspoken and the sense that therein lies the truth of one’s experience. Inspired by automatic writing and the simple act of mark making I use drawing and painting to touch what otherwise eludes me and to remember what’s been forgotten.
Painting is my way of cracking open fixed notions of identity in favor of something closer to our true nature – a constant state of becoming. I scribble, make marks, splash paint and scrawl on the canvas - using painting as an intuitive act that gets beneath the surface of our otherwise well polished, edited and fixed versions of self. In the act of painting, personal experiences, overheard bits of dialogue, internal monologue and fragments of thought collide on the canvas with what the act of painting loosens from my subconscious mind: the archetypal, the repressed, desires, fears, self-perceptions.
All of this is captured in the images archaeologically - as partial evidence of the past, while simultaneously lending itself to new, emerging narratives. Lines and splashes of paint morph into landscapes, forms and figures are temporarily halted on their way to becoming something else while still retaining the whiff of something ineffably familiar. They both testify to, and cancel the past.
The fragmented forms, partial landscapes and bits of text are like notes written to ourselves; scrawled on a scrap of paper in the hopes that having written it we will remember what seemed so important. Discovering these scraps later, we rarely recall what we were thinking at the time.
Because these images are not purely rational nor purely subconscious, (but are a combination of both), rational analysis fails the viewer. I intentionally create a space that resists easy definitions and one-dimensional readings. “This reminds me of,” is only useful if it is in service of, “Where might this take me?” In this terrain questions are more important than answers.