SECOND
CHILDHOOD
MY
PUZZLE
Sometimes, it seems to me that the project’s idea has been long found and only awaits the right moment to take its optimal shape. On my way to that moment, I am solving puzzles, one after another. That’s how it happened with Second Childhood. As I gave birth, I immediately realized that my life had changed drastically. Yet, feeling part of the family line, accepting myself as a mother, nostalgic flashbacks from my childhood when interacting with my son. It was a piecemeal process. In art, I was groping too.
The first steps were unconscious, as if in fog. That’s how the Imprints series came into being. I was just producing prints using every object in my reach. I would go to sleep, wake up and take my unique paper to create the first series, now fully aware of what I was doing and using artistic techniques. Printing photos on fabric and adding embroidery was not typical of me. Still, there was a period after my son’s surgery when we were sitting together at home, and I had to slow myself down not to get all emotional.
I now understand why women sew and do embroidery. It’s like meditation. Sketching children in the streets or drawing them from pictures is about capturing the moment. For that, you need to put yourself on pause. There was also an underwater video shooting, but that’s another story.
I would like to tell you about it and show you the video. Join us watching it!
A year ago, I was searching for allegories to fit my psychological state.
It was a period of prolonged isolation with my child. My son and I spent a few months
together. The mother-child identification process launched inside. I don't remember
the idea with the two cubes, one made of mirrors and the other of glass.
The underwater video shooting is unforgettable...
Sri Lanka, March, 2019
"Second Childhood" was born along with my son, over
five years ago. ?
⠀
Every meaningful project draws on some emotionally
charged period in my life. For me, it was July 2014
⠀
I had started painting before I could walk. The project
"Second Childhood" is similar in that. I had begun
creating it before I felt I had the strength to do it. That's
why the first paintings are the most powerful and
significant. “Imprints" is a series of graphic watercolors
on unusual paper. This paper is my professional secret.?
⠀
I created compositions from the prints left by toys or
baby food bottles. I just washed them off with water
and continued working.
⠀
Due to the specifics of the materials and my life at the
time, they were all created in a heartbeat.
Painting abstract canvases, 2x2 meters, and embroidering on a handkerchief are two contrasted activities that test your flexibility.
Strangely enough, I’m good at both. The question is when and under what circumstances. I never want to stop. Yet staying at home with my son for a long time initiated my search for an emotional balance and led to experiments in embroidery.
Something profound, genetically ingrained, and historical was triggered inside me. My ancestors also stitched and embroidered. It was a normal woman’s activity for pacing down. It came to me naturally.
Here they are, little experiments — the puzzles of the project that keeps scaling up.
Second Childhood is currently the longest-running
project in my creative career.
⠀
I created some elements of the installation a long time
ago, and it did not have such a title from the
beginning.
⠀
For example, I created rapid sketches on playgrounds.
⠀
When I sketched children with frozen fingers, ignoring
possible frostbites, I did not think of these drawings as
part of a total installation and artistic research
conducted in various countries.❄
⠀
It was just a small detail of a huge puzzle, and the final
outcome was a mystery to me.
I like to do experiments and involve myself in them. Little quiet games of an artist in the conditions of motherhood and ensuing social isolation.
Doing sketches of children on the playground is one way to experiment. You get a lot of adrenaline in this process. Inhale.
Finish the sketch. Exhale. But when I was sitting at home with my son, I would click on the photos from the playgrounds, as if they were jars with summer preserves you open joyfully in winter.
Then I would work with watercolors at a leisurely pace. I translated colored photos and black and white sketches, omitting details as if following the memory processes. Partial “erasing” and saving only fragments.