Process, Analysis and Theoretical Framework

The Blackening began with a digital fragmentation of an earlier 1989 oil painting titled Zion (Fig. 1). Referencing this digital image (Fig. 2), I created a small acrylic painting (30cm x 20cm). The addition of wooden batons extended the picture plane, symbolising transcendence, transitioning from one world to another, the two-dimensional to the physical three-dimensional. This intuitive process created an increasingly complex sculptural frame that protrudes from the picture plane into the viewer’s space, physically occluding and fragmenting the painting. A distorted spiral staircase, made from wood fragments, permeates the structure that precariously leans outwards, inviting the viewer into an unstable space.

My practice is process-led and aims to encourage a dialogue with the unconscious. Through analysis, the significance of emerging symbols and archetypes is often revealed retrospectively; layers of meaning become apparent over time. My practice signifies a synchronistic convergence, where my creative process and theory evolve in parallel. I am guided by the psychic and the symbolic.

Painting the wood batons black in this work aligns with the alchemical nigredo, the blackening stage of putrefaction, death, and psychic dissolution that marks the beginning of transformation. The blackened, fragmented, unstable structure indicates a descent into the unconscious, a confrontation with the shadow and the archetypal chaos that precedes renewal. The precarious construction symbolises personal psychic collapse and a confrontation with the collective unconscious, a state of disorder that resonates with Jung’s concept of the archetypal apocalypse and the metacrisis.

Digitally fragmenting original paintings and translating them back into paint connects with Walter Benjamin’s discourse on the loss of aura in mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1935) and Jos De Mul’s extension of this concept to digital recombination (de Mul, no date). This layered engagement with authenticity, transformation, and multiplicity also resonates with Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. (Baudrillard, 2019). Layered connections and works grow in complexity, where synchronistic unconscious entanglement between symbolic form and intellectual inquiry converges.



This process also connects with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Rhizome, Deterritorialisation, and Reterritorialisation. (Gilman et al., 1989)

The construction of The Blackening emerged through an intuitive process and material experimentation. This work represents a symbolic threshold, a recurring theme representing a liminal space. The original painting Zion suggests transcendence and ascent. Its transposition and fragmentation, expressed within an unstable, blackened framework, reveal a previously luminous image as obscured, distorted, and labyrinthine. The Blackening symbolises the descent into the alchemical nigredo as a personal experience of psychic disintegration and dissociation, and a collective state mirrored in the archetypal apocalypse and the initial phase of transformation: a confrontation with dissolution, insecurity, and disorientation.