I have called my exhibition "Archetypes" because synchronicity - that is, meaningful coincidences - seem to be pervasive and powerful aspeects of my painting: an objective event coincides in a meaningful manner with a psychic process. This presupposes not only an all-pervading latent meaning - recognizable by consciousness - but also that unconscious synchronicity occurs where there is a meaningful coincidence between a schizoid process and a physical event, even though, it has yet to be recognised by consciousness. It is through the archetype that we come closest to the power of synchronicity and to the realisation that the external world of Nature is not dead mechanistic matter from which we are cut off and upon which we impose meaning but is a manifestation of a primordial unity of which we are part. My exhibition is, then, a tribute to Nature as the process of painting these pictures was an exploration of what the unconscious thinks and the expression of a meaning apparently outside the human. Even though the figurations in the paintings seem to be anthropocentric in nature and feminine in spirit, they do not reduce the archetypal structures and constellations to the conscious manipulation of the artist but, rather, testify to the feeling evoked by the luminosity that surrounds the archetypal level. This is the level of the instinct, the animal, and the mother that is activated because reason fails, even though, it is not without reason. Archetypes appear in dreams and in paintings and in myths as the motif of animal, guardian spirit, helper, saint and saviour. Animal, Nature and the Feminine have in the history of western culture been designated as that which needs to be saved - evil without meaning. But through painting the threshold between inner and outer the individual and the collective unconsciousness is lowered and the saving power of what has been historically denigrated is rendered manifest through a sympathy of all things: a primordial unity which testifies to a non-psychic aspect of archetypal material which comes from an unconscious form of existence. Psychic contents from this state act as much outside me as in me - as much outside time as in time. Archetypes are not just concepts, they are entities.
Rose Anne Barr
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