Nigredo began as a spontaneous freeform drawing on canvas. A labyrinthine grid structure emerged through multiple layers of drawing and painting. Layers were separated with transparent gesso and varnish. This technique creates depth and reflects the stratified, often inaccessible nature of repressed trauma.

The labyrinthine grid at the centre of Nigredo evokes a sense of confusion and disorientation; there is no clear path. Its complex, illogical structure, shifting perspectives, and overlapping forms create visual ambiguity and spatial paradoxes. The labyrinth symbolises both a descent into the unconscious and a movement towards transcendence, reflecting the cyclical process of transformation through fragmentation and reintegration, collapse and emergence.

The spatial ambiguity in Nigredo, where structures occupy contradictory positions, enhances a sense of unreality. Perspectives that do not align with physical space mirror the experience of dissociation, where instability prevails and the boundaries between the real and the unreal blur. The work evokes an internal psychic space of fragmentation.

The rocks surrounding the structure form a container, a recurring motif in my work. Rocks suggest stability, but in this piece, they appear unstable and treacherous, defying gravity and evoking a sense of disintegration and collapse. The container represented here by the rocks symbolises the struggle for containment described by Oono Van Der Haart in The Haunted Self, where trauma fragments the self into dissociated parts lacking integration. The cavernous structure becomes a symbolic alchemical vessel, a vas bene clausum, that contains overwhelming psychic material.

The use of black in Nigredo is crucial to its meaning. It represents the initial alchemical stage of nigredo, a state of psychic death, disorientation, and confrontation with the shadow. The black and white palette symbolises opposing forces: chaos and order, shadow and light, which converge in the coniunctio oppositorum, the alchemical union of opposites. This tension between opposites evokes Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian: the interplay between structure and dissolution.

References

Jung, C.G. and Jung, C.G. (1977) Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press (The collected works of C.G. Jung, v. 14).

Moskowitz, A. (2007) ‘The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. By Onnovan der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis & Kathy Steele. W.W. Norton. 2006.

Nietzsche, F. (2012) The Birth of Tragedy. Newburyport: Dover Publications (Dover Thrift Editions).