"(Meta)morphes": my duo show at peep art gallery and a journey under water

Summer is officially over, I haven’t had a minute to stop! Now fall is off to a flying start!

I spent a good part of August creating the works that I’m excited to present at the Peet Art Gallery as part of Métamorphes, a dual exhibition where my creations will organically engage in dialogue with the photographs of Frédéric Roulet.

The opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 19, starting at 6 PM, as part of the BAS, Brussels Art Square, an art event bringing together 58 participants throughout the historic Sablon district, in the heart of Brussels, from September 19 to 22.

As part of this exhibition, I will be exclusively presenting ten works from two new series, which are themselves in dialogue with each other: 'Tentacles of Love – In the Dark Deep' and 'Sea Dream – The Birth of Venus', each weaving the theme of the feminine marine world in its own way, both dark and luminous, between the viscosity of tentacles and the shimmering of seashells.

I invite everyone to open their imagination and explore the symbols embedded in these works, which, like the ocean depths, contain many hidden meanings.

To begin this underwater adventure together, here are a few entries from the marvelous Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, published by Taschen:

Octopus

Appearing in the depths like an amorphous phantasm, all head and feet (cephalopod), the eight-tentacled sea mollusk octopus has received humanity's deep est imaginings about the mysteries of dissolution and regeneration. An elusive mandala-in-motion, the image of octopus brings together extremely negative and positive attributes, a paradox that expresses the hidden connections between chaos, emptiness and the ordering capacity of the psyche.

Symbolically, octopus often belongs to the fateful round of the Great Mother. Like other archetypal "monsters of the deep," ancient mariners seem to have considered it one of the most grotesque and frightening terrors of the sea, capable of pulling whole ships down to a watery grave. A recurring motif in decorative Minoan and Greek art, was the octopus also a model for the many-headed Hydra, or for the paralyzing Medusa to whose big, round head, staring eyes and tentacles of hair the octopus bears an uncanny resemblance? The Greeks dubbed both the octopus and their great sea-hero Odysseus "polumetis" (loosely translated as "wisdom" and "magical cunning").

Perhaps the sea monsters who menaced Odysseus and his crew personified the terrifying undifferentiated aspects of the classical Greek psyche, understood as dangerous, capable of sucking in and emptying out, until mastered by the creative and clever Odysseus? Related to the astrological sign of Cancer, the moon, the summer solstice and the depths, the octopus resembles its cousins-the whirlpool, the spider's web, the wheel and the spiral-in representing both the mystic center, and the unfolding of creation through dissolution.

Highly intelligent, challenging even the higher vertebrates, octopuses lost the invertebrate's need for a shell as a result of their extreme agility and mobility. They range in size from a tiny 2 inches to an arm span of 33 feet, if a tentacle is wounded or breaks off, another will grow in its place. Their sense of touch is exquisite, and the eyes of an octopus very closely resemble the highly developed human eye. Octopuses can "read" letterlike shapes. An extreme shapeshifter, elastic and liquid, octopus changes colors freely with its emotional state or to blend in with the environment for protection-from grey to red, pink, white, blue and greens.

Having often succumbed to a case of maligned and mistaken identity, the image of the octopus symbolically depicts an encounter with the depths of the psyche, in all its ambivalence, suffering and seeming chaos. Both remote from, and yet similar to humanity, having a special affinity with the fluidity and dynamics of psychological process, the "soft alien intelligence" of the octopus symbolizes totality-in-motion, activating the imagination, which in turn promises new possibilities of awareness, The healing potential of this deep awareness, which instinctively seeks possible connections and opens questions, is expressed in charming folk wisdom: In rural areas of Japan, where the octopus was credited with human emotions and desires, talisman images of a seven-tentacled octopus were employed in the fight against whooping cough. When a cure came about, the eighth leg was drawn in, and the image of the octopus set afloat on the currents of a strong river.

Shell

From time immemorial, we have held conch shells to our cars to hear the surflike sound -the eternal tides of life that engrave their markings upon us. The human ear resembles a shell, gathering vibrations of air in its outer cavity called the "conch," and directing them through the winding passages of its shell-like inner ear as sound, symbolically evoking an interior listening.

Shells are mysterious sea treasure, in beautiful shapes, sometimes symmetrical, often ridged and whorled, reflecting stages of growth. The recesses of a shell are reminiscent of the sacred spiral, labyrinth and center. The intimation of marine life is also allusion to the hidden life of our interior world, sometimes surfacing, leaving its evidence in consciousness, sometimes not. A shell is an exoskeleton serving to protect the vulnerable creature that dwells within. But shells are also delicate, easily broken, not the tough carapace of defensiveness. We speak of coming out of, or going into, one's "shell," suggesting gradual, tenuous exposure to the world, or of retreat from it, in privacy, refuge or withdrawal.

The shape and depth of some shells, the lush pink of their coloring, brings to mind the female vulva, associating the shell with the allure and mystery of the feminine, and with incarnation and fertility. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love (to the Romans Venus), materializing out of the ocean's foam, is borne ashore on a seashell.

We adorn our selves with shells, remembering the goddess and her beauty, her seductions. The shell and its evocation of the uterine salt-sea, the moon, and tidal ebb and flow, impart a sense of birth and rebirth. Early Christians made the empty shell an image of the soul's departure to immortality.