Katie Costello: Artist Statement
Dreams.
Dreaming. The experience of dreaming possesses within it everything
pertaining to life. It is a reflection of life, of experience, of fears,
needs and desires. A dream holds every answer and means nothing. It
is concrete and transient and omnipresent and ungraspable. We do not
know why we dream or where we go. We do not know if we have control.
By the finish, we do not know what has been accomplished. This occurs
every night, an entire lifetime experienced and most usually forgotten.
As individuals, we are confronted with dreams very early in our lives.
It is an event that occurs naturally and repeatedly. As a society, we
strive to contextualize this phenomenon in a way that it may be more
easily explainable to ourselves. Beginning in the early twentieth century,
a boom in the general interest in dreams was created when the great
psychologists of the time began publishing works on their own philosophies
of the occurrence. Through “The Interpretation of Dreams,”
Sigmund Freud expressed his idea that dreams are a process of subconscious
wish fulfillment whereas information is coded to shield us from the
undesirable. Jung, by contrast, felt that dreams were a way to heal
the psyche and that by interpreting dreams through dream analysis, one
could progress toward individuation (the force by which one becomes
whole and indivisible). Many other writings followed with more theories
arising, all with some similar threads of thought. But concepts of dreaming
have influenced all areas of our experience. Children’s writers
such as Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, and Dr. Seuss have all incorporated
the nonsensical, transient, and sublime machinations of thought inherent
to dreaming in their stories. The Surrealists such as Dali and Duchamp
have also had a close connection with the subject matter of dreams.
Dali even paired with Alfred Hitchcock to produce a dream sequence for
the 1945 thriller “Spellbound.” Because dreaming is so connected
with us physically, the concepts present in the process exist in practically
every aspect of our social lives as well. We strive for an understanding.
I believe in the power of dreams, in their duality as question and answer.
They possess a grace with which they may change someone’s life;
and that change many times occurs while the mind is awake.
A man once told me, “You need to live like you are dreaming.”
In that statement he could not have a better understanding of the connections
between conscious and unconscious experience. Each night people live
thousands of lives without the hindrances of inhibitions, societal constraints,
or physical boundaries. Their mind prepares a setting in which they
can exist and experiment. A person’s life is represented the same.
You are surrounded by what you choose to see, experience and influence.
You have an entire world that has been tailored specifically for you
and it is only you who can set your own limitations.
People do not often behave this way because they do not know how long
their dream will last or what lies beyond it. Perhaps another dream,
perhaps someone else’s dream. But it is assured, as is everything
in nature, that something will follow.
Dreams are necessary to my life. I seek fulfillment and adventure from
them at night and reflection and understanding of them by day. I have
learned to trust my dreams because there is no part of them that is
alien to my waking life. My mind has constructed everything from what
I have fed it and I am aware of the powerful capabilities afforded to
me by listening. Each day I wake from my other life and wonder at the
experiences I have had. Each evening, before sleep, I do the same with
my waking life before entering into the former life again. I have afforded
myself two lives. I am cheating death.
I did not always live this way. Like most of us, I always relished recounting
the dreams I could remember and wondered at how such machinations of
unconscious could arise. But over the summer after my second year of
college, I decided, or rather, was required by way of credit fulfillment
to take an art theory class. Of the visiting faculty, Bernard Welt of
the Corcoran College of Art and Design was to teach a class on the “Language
of Dreams” in which various schools of thought on dreams would
be studied. This course, coupled with the personal views of Professor
Welt, encouraged me to take a much closer look at what my mind was up
to all night. What I discovered continues to astonish me to this day.
With the experiences I have had over my twenty-one short years of life,
my mind has unfailingly created new and ever-changing worlds for me
to explore through my unconscious. It is from these worlds that I more
increasingly look to for my art, my other love in life.
When I first began to incorporate dream theory into my art, I was at
the very beginning of my art career at Saint Mary’s College. I
had talent enough to create something “pretty” but I did
not know what I wanted to say. Initially I used the “shock”
approach utilized by the Surrealists and Dadaists. I combined unusual
materials with absurd ideas. One of my favorite projects was constructed
life-size copper shrimp which I installed in water fountains, elevators
and even a women’s lavatory. I called upon the spontaneous and
the nonsensical aspect of dreams as inspiration for these works. The
result was a shocked-yet-amused and predictably confused audience. This
confusion resulted in a separation between myself and the audience and
myself and the art. All three aspects to art: creator, piece, and audience,
were spread as far as possible.
Though this was my initial goal in creating these shocking pieces, I
came to feel the disconnection in a negative way. My attentions turned
toward connecting with the piece and the audience.
I began experimenting with ideas of how to connect to the pieces. Over
the summer after my third year I focused on what surrounded me, what
I knew. During this period an accident occurred which left me bed-bound
for weeks heavily sedated and constantly dreaming. As I had to narrow
my focus, I found increasing comfort and inspiration at the wonder that
was my own body. Each day, I would draw contour lines of my hands, feet,
and other organs as a type of experiment and also as a type of meditation.
Over time, I began to develop a very intimate connection with my slow,
careful drawings. I began to arrange them into morphing forms, a collection
of fingers and legs and folds of skin. This was a connection with my
art that I wished to pursue. I began looking at the works of Uruguayan
Marco Maggi. His subtle, intricate works had much the same reading as
I wished to express. Though his pieces had no distinct message for the
viewer, their mood was easily expressed through tiny, repetitive decisions.
The time taken to create each piece is easily evident in the mark making.
He creates a quiet universe which invites the viewer. In this arena,
the viewer may enter into the artist’s environment, their mind-set.
There is a focus on organic concepts through his selection of materials
and his focus on multiplicity and repetition. In his own words, he creates
pieces and installations where “unending beginnings recur:”
cycles.
I became very interested in the use of repetition to connect with the
organic. As a process, it forms into a meditation for me. Continued
repetitive movements allow me to understand the piece I am creating,
become more intimate with it, and search for the subtleties of change.
As a formal quality, repetition signifies time. The cycles of nature
are continually renewing but nothing remains the same. Time has the
ability to alter and transform to create new, individual experiences.
It is the sign of life. It is how we know that we are aging, that the
world is changing.
I continued to be fascinated with the things in life that connected
us: our bodies, emotions, things universal to man. But I wished to preserve
a separation from the obvious in my work. I wanted enough coding to
occur within my abstraction so that one could never be positive, but
they could have an understanding as to what I was conveying to them.
As I entered my fourth year and was no longer incapacitated, I returned
to my sculpture with some new insights. From Maggi and my contour drawings
I began to focus more on abstraction from the body. I began to represent
human forms and feelings through inorganic materials such as steel and
copper. I also enjoyed working large scale. To some respect at this
point, I felt that life size was the most relevant way to present my
art as it addressed the audience member in a particular way. As small
pieces, my works were objects to be analyzed, but as works comparable
to the size of the audience, a new element comes to light. The audience
member enters into a separate environment in which this piece exists
and so he becomes part of that environment as well. A subtle connection
is made, the sharing of a particular space in time. However, the conceptual
disconnection with the audience was still unresolved. The pieces were
beautiful objects backed with no conceptual meaning; they felt empty.
To remedy this, I began looking at artists who were after some of the
same conceptual ideas, but worked in different media.
Dale Chihuly, an artist known for his incredible forms in glass, was
a great inspiration to me. His installations are generally large scale
and full of color and movement. They transform the environment in which
they exist so the viewer and the piece form that unspoken connection.
What is more, they seem to convey a discernable message, a mood that
connects directly with the audience in a way that is not completely
explainable. The forms are almost recognizable and the feeling conveyed
through light can be reminiscent of a memory passed or maybe it represents
a secret wish for the future. Chihuly captures an emotion and holds
it for the viewer. This is entirely dependent upon the coexistence between
the objects themselves, their environment, and the
dramatic effect of the light. All are equal. An experience is created
rather than an art-viewing.
As an experiment, I began RMM, a sculptural representation of the relationship
I had with the subject of the piece. I began very simply with repetitive
contour line drawings of the model and the piece began to evolve. The
aesthetic choices seemed to have occurred outside of my conscious, such
as the form for the piece and the color red. I finally began to feel
the connections materialize and I began to trust myself and my audience.
This piece represented an experience to me and it was to be a jumping
off point into the work I am involved with today.
I have found the connection between dreams and art to be so strong that
I have come to rely on them almost exclusively and I have never been
let down. They contain infinite possibilities for the artist, one chooses
what to discern and translate to waking life. When I have to make a
particular decision about a piece I am working on, such as color or
materials, I simply study my options and then go to sleep.
Somewhere deep within them, I believe everyone was born instilled with
the answers to the questions they ask themselves concerning life and
its functions. In my short experience on this earth, I find that many
times they aren’t really looking for one. The question in itself
is enough. Every day and every night, we are presented with new questions.
We have a luxury of picking and choosing which ones we will strive to
answer.
Lately, I have taken up a large scale endeavor. I had a dream not too
long ago that showed me an entire lifetime. I had created something
I had never experienced before, but somehow understood at that moment.
Every day and every year and every person ran together and over and
over again this happened. I came to find that it was the cycles and
the beauty in the change that I found so inspiring. I wished to share
this.
A type of mentor in this endeavor is the eccentric Scotch artist Andy
Goldsworthy. His obsession with natural cycles in nature parallels the
cycles of life with which I am fascinated. Mr. Goldsworthy is aware
of the patterns of generation, decay, and regeneration and exemplifies
that through materials in his working environment. He takes his pieces
“to the edge of collapse,” where they are most beautiful,
most delicate. It is the passage of time which focuses the viewer. His
“Arches at Goodwood,” 2002, are beautiful examples of this.
Repeated forms in materials which do not traditional convey images of
life are transformed. Delicate repeating structures created of stone
represent cycles of life that even the stone itself cannot escape. Viewers
witness this marvel and make universal connections. They do not merely
see arches made of stone, but they see the process by which they were
created and the quiet in which they exist. In a photograph, these constructions
live forever and are already gone, subject to the cycles of decay.
In this gallery is a type of shorthand for something I want to continue
to be mesmerized by for the rest of my life. It represents all the days
after my dream and it represents all the years after your birth and
the lives that have come before and the cycles that will continue long
after we do. It is not just me or you and it is all of me and you. It
represents something we all have, we all experience. It is a tension
between the delicate and the steadfast, the new and the decaying, and
it is a tension between the nostalgic and the hopes and reassurances
of things to come. But more importantly, it is a combination of our
dreaming and waking lives in which we allow ourselves to experience
all these things. I could not tell you what to feel or how to experience
it, but I ask you to start by being a witness like me.