By Grace Slaven, visual artist and PhD candidate
To transform takes metamorphosis. It cannot be learnt, only experienced.
Kelsey Ashe 2024, 109.
Hand etched drawing Screen-Printed in Botanical inks
Indigo, Chlorophyll, Myrolaban,
Photoluminescent pigment (glow in the dark),
Wax on Canvas. Black Floating Frame.
200cmH x 140cmW x 5cmD.
In 1874, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Proserpine (Persephone). The dark-haired maiden clutches a pomegranate - a wound-like slither of skin peeled back exposing the rubied seeds within. Her gaze is downturned and contemplative as the blue-green drapery of her robes dances, ripples and cascades over her like an oceanic tide pulling her back into the depths. These same tones punctuate, if not completely envelope, the rhythmic graphic contours of Kelsey Ashe's panoramic printed worlds of The Deep Green Sea. They invite us into the realm of the Antipodean, the mythic, the unconscious. Like Persephone, we are drawn into the underworld: a land of mystery, adversity, transformation, and growth.
For depth psychologists, myth chooses us, not the other way around (Downing 1981 & Nelson 2016). It finds us by way of dreams, imagination and creative expression. Before The Deep Green Sea, Ashe had visions of selkies and bald mermaids: young female presences, shape-shifting and traversing watery abysses. The myth of Persephone, and her mother, Demeter, seems to have found Ashe in the last few years, in creativity and life.
This tale of a daughter's abduction into the underworld, and the lengths her mother would go to find and rescue her, has been compared to the artistic process and self-discovery. For Jungian analyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estés (2005), Persephone is the embodiment of the playfulness necessary for creativity, which ebbs and flows throughout the lifecycle. Revisions have also been made to readings of her relationship with her abductor/husband. It has been suggested by Elizabeth Eowyn Nelson (2016) that the subsequent reciprocity of Persephone’s union with Hades makes a “shared healing” possible which imbues the underworld with fertility. As such, the underworld, while often unsettling and painful, is also a space of knowledge, inspiration, and individuation.
The Deep Green Sea sits within a tradition in which feminist-surrealist artmaking intersects with literature. This intersection, tracing as far back as the 1940s in the works of Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, through to more contemporary works by Rikki Ducornet, is underpinned by an anti-anthropocentrism and increasing ecological awareness (Noheden 2023). For Ashe, her artworks serve as a “visual prologue” for The Deep Green Sea novella. Similarly, Kristoffer Noheden posits that the use of the novel in surrealism narrates “entwined transformations of self and world”. Ashe’s fable of Roe, a selkie-child whose journey through the underworld, aided and hindered by the female-governed Isle of the Mirage, blurs the boundaries between past and future, humans and the natural world. The narrative is electric with surrealist wonder in the spirit of Pierre Mabille’s 1940 seminal text, The Mirror of the Marvelous. For Mabille, the marvellous depicts “rites of passage that are [at the same time] exterior and interior… by which effect a transformation of the self as well as of the world” (Noheden, 260). Roe’s transformation and healing are not only hers but that of every human and creature in The Deep Green Sea.
The Gaian society of The Deep Green Sea, akin to that depicted within Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974), expresses an eco-feminism that reinforces the relationship between feminist-surrealism and Gothicism. Like surrealism, the Gothic celebrates nature, and the sublime, and has been suggested by some scholars to be the defiant, irrational, ‘feminine’ opposite of masculine order (Williams 1995). Time is not linear, doppelgangers are frequent, and the landscape, particularly the Antipodean, is a homage to Freud’s theorising on the uncanny. Moreover, Kimberley Marwood (2014) has cited the conventions of the Gothic novel as a source of liberation for female members of the original surrealist movement, which was infamous for its misogynistic tendencies. Within the tale of The Deep Green Sea, bodies transform, metamorphose and dissolve, leaving only the unconscious. We are witness to a chimeric bond between humans and the primordial ocean depths inhabiting our psyche that is inherently gothic. For Dr Catriona McAra (2023), the topography becomes a character in the works of many female surrealists, an observation that can be extended to Ashe. The ocean cradles the female form in their shared liminality; Roe is comforted and nurtured by creatures of the sea, including the mythic Bishop-Fish, an enigmatic figure that preoccupied sixteenth-century European folklore.
These symbols presented to us, bring us back to the artworks accompanying Ashe’s novella. The Bishop-Fish, a source of guidance for Roe, subverts the patriarchal structures of Christianity as an embodiment of surrealist anti-anthropocentrism. So too do the site-specific seascapes and landscapes that fill the walls of the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, once a Catholic Chapel, and reminiscent of the French Catholic Convent School of Ashe’s youth in Tasmania. Ashe fuses this Gothic aesthetic with the Japanese philosophy of yugen, “something calm and deep… unfathomable and difficult to place in words” (Ashe 2022) and its relation to a search for a synthesis of spiritual experience with art and life. These cross-cultural influences emphasise the universality of the hero’s journey, but also a warning of impending ecological disaster.
The Deep Green Sea is a feminist ecological allegory where art and text unite in meditation, reflection and prayer for guidance, strength and healing for self and world.
Like Persephone, Roe’s journey to the underworld is necessary for individuation but is also a metonym for the inherent link between femininity and nature. Ashe has deftly communicated this relationship, transporting us through a labyrinth of recognisable but subverted archetypes and mythic tracts. Through feminist surrealism, supported by an amalgam of Western and Eastern aesthetic principles, we travel history and an unknown environmental future. The resulting visual and literary journey is one of light and dark, cognitive dissonance and finally, catharsis.
References:
Ashe, Kelsey. 2024. The Deep Green Sea. Fremantle: Dark Swan Publications.
Eowyn Nelson, Elizabeth. 2016. “Embodying Persephone’s Desire: Authentic Movement and Underworld Transformation”. Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies 11(1): 5-17. https://doi.org/10.29173/jjs37s.
Downing, Christine. 1981. The Goddess: Mythological images of the feminine. New York: Crossroad.
Marwood, Kimberley. 2014. “Imaginary Dimensions: Women, Surrealism and the Gothic”. In Women and Gothic, edited by Maria Purves, 39-62. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
McAra, Catriona. “Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel”. In A History of the Surrealist Novel, edited by Anna Watz, 348-363. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noheden, Kristoffer. 2023. “Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel”. In A History of the Surrealist Novel, edited by Anna Watz, 259 – 276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pinkola Estés, Clarissa. 2005. Creative Fire: Myths and Stories on the Cycles of Creativity. Colorado: Sounds True.
Williams, Anne. 1995. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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