4th painting : Source
Year 2024, I'm staying with my friend Joelle and her husband. We took a week to paint together. After the harshness of the subject matter and the creation of Guilt, I decide to turn to pink and paint a waking dream, that of being in my mother’s womb. Shadows were leaning over me and I was worried.
Des ombres se penchaient sur moi et je me sentais inquiète. J’avais peint ce rêve en rentrant chez moi sur un vieux carton. Je rapproche ce rêve d’un autre récurrent de mon enfance : je suis dans une maison et je ne peux pas sortir car toutes les portes et les fenêtres sont bouchées par une membrane qu’on ne peut pas franchir. J’étouffe.
(work carried out two years earlier following another psychoanalysis session which reflects a first approach to the final work - I placed it here because it is linked to this first paragraph)
I had painted this dream on an old cardboard box when I came home. I relate this dream to another recurring one from my childhood: I'm in a house and I can’t get out because all the doors and windows are sealed with a membrane that you can't get through. I'm sufocating.
To create this piece, I drew on 6 years of continuing professional training in systemic family therapy. I was able to explore my family relationships over 4 generations using genosociograms, presentations to training groups, family carving, an interview with my immediate family, and a family novel. I wasn’t content with staying on the surface, I can’t help myself, I had to dig deeper into my family history in search of the shadows that were hovering over me in that waking dream of my mother's womb. So I disregarded the maxim emphasized during the training sessions, and one that belongs to me: to live happily, live in secrecy. It would be better to be silent than to speak, but I need to talk, to dig, to do archaeological excavations, to understand these deep-seated fears. In the course of this work, unforeseen changes occurred in my family that have afected me up close and from afar with varying degrees of emotional intensity. One day, a cousin called me and told me a secret, I fell apart. I asked around, I struggled with it, then it ran out of steam and everything went quiet again. Only now I know. Another day, I discover that one of my uncles is the half-brother of the rest of my father's siblings – he doesn’t even have the same last name - but I should have known; I had not realized how important that "technicality" was in bringing order to my way of seeing the world, in setting the right boundaries for my inner life.
The more I focus on my immediate and extended family, the worse I feel. I try to make the best of it: I have to. It’s necessary and yet painful. I dive into the labyrinth of emotions that arise, that finally speak to each other, but that I also experience in my body. I'm in the belly of the beast. The smooth surface of the story being told is no match for the emotional experience. Emotions don't lie; you can always deny them for a while, but they are right in front of you and they are a wake-up call. They allow us to feel alive, to experience life.
A cousin entrusted me with a notebook that my paternal great-grandmother had written for her son, my grandfather, about genealogy and family stories.
I'm inspired by her presentation for the plastic realization of my painting. She uses an arched layout to symbolize the generations, which reminds me of a womb, the inside of a uterus. I decide to use this representation to draw the background of the painting. I place an umbilical cord tree. I feel that the colors should be organic, vegetal and dreamy at the same time: pink-red-brown to evoke the family roots into which we are born, from which we are nourished, which is our breeding ground. There is an element of fatality in this genetics and in the inheritance of family relationships, which is why it's so important to know your heritage in order to escape from fatality.
At the end of the first day's work, I took a break and a friend of Joelle‘s came to visit and saw what I was painting. She gives me some interesting feedback: it lacks light. The next morning, I go out and buy some neon pink before I start painting the background again. Then I restructure the umbilical cord tree. Then comes the moment when I write the names of the people in my family with a brush. I concentrate on the connections, the work is easy, I've done it several times before.
Then came a strange moment when I wanted to draw the brother who died before me, when he was a 5-month-old fetus in the womb, but who has no name. I turned to Joelle. How can I make him appear here, since he has no name? "The Little Prince!", was her reply, obviously.