Irene Sweeney
Studying personal psychological experience which gives insight into collective trauma is the raison d'être of my paintings and text-based artworks. I create these artworks to shed a light on traumatic memory, how it effects the brain-body connection as well as phenomenological experience.
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It is integral for me that I capture something which feels untainted, sincere to its core. This has simply been the psychological result of years of hidden truth. I have become someone who is soothed by control; my creative process reflects this trait. A symbiotic relationship is created through this; between myself, and the act of painting. The activity adopts a cathartic role as the painting slowly comes to life, each carefully image extracted hue constructs something which communicates the internalised evocative fear that cannot be communicated by words alone.
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The materiality of trauma is something which intrigues me. How does the object retain the experiential? Perhaps the moment captured through the subconscious inclinations of the mind, which directs and frames the image, is the binding catalyst for the immemorial or hazed traumatic memory, and the object. In the symbiotic process, there is a visceral translation of paint to surface during which an ebb and flow of rigid and palpatative tensions held in the body come across onto surface, through each stroke of the brush. “Sensation is what is being painted…what is being painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced at sustaining this sensation.” (Giles Deleuze). An abridgement of my area of enquiry is the belief that: you perceive what you have felt, when encountering an artwork. Feeling, seeing, and hearing become one in the same to the traumatised mind, as traumatic memory intercepts separations between the senses. Through capturing objects and feelings of personal fascination, deterrence, fear, or connection I conceptualise my own cognitive processing of trauma into that which can transform itself into something cathartic and therapeutic for both myself and the viewer.
