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SHADOW WORK: LA OTRA
2024

My shadow runs alongside me, weaving in and out of my cells, desperate for attention as a means to make me whole. She is La Otra, my Other.

 

Surrendering to shadow contains a charge within it, contains a deep hum of disquiet… But, once in that fruitful darkness, it’s a time of bone rattling honesty.

 

Shadows began appearing in my work a long time ago – and in earnest at the end of 2023. I used to call these figures my ‘Night Women’, a magnificent grouping of forces who would appear time and time again in my work, made of star dense darkness.

 

They then appeared in October of last year in forms more akin to folkloric renderings of archetypes.

 

Their more primitive presence created ripples on my lake – and also reflected the terrors and bloated dark acts of the external world gone mental, like they were giving shape to the trauma responses roaming the globe.

 

That’s when I stayed with them and swam with them and just kept releasing them.

 

Carl Jung’s ‘collective conscious field’ met my personal struggles, and the mythic met the common place. But my work introduced me to (or perhaps gave a visceral felt form to) a deepening into life that I hadn’t encountered before – and believe me, I thought I’d trawled the depths!

 

The forms that have come through are limber, many being singular while some are dancing, trusting and joining with another energy: integration, perhaps, of my anima and animus, my masculine and feminine energies.

 

A true seeing of my capacity to destroy, to harm, and to rage ran alongside that which loves, empathises and soothes.

 

It has been a stretching out of the body that has been bent out of shape to appease and please.

 

I had become lopsided, and this body of work has weighted my opposite.

 

Embodying the shadow has been medicine in a time of massive darkness. It lifted me from denial to integration.

 

It has revealed a peace derived from owning my less palatable, but no less human,  traits..reveling in and releasing a rage that had never had a home.

 

Dancing with my shadow has given me courage and fortified me enough to pursue liberation.

Faye Dobinson 2024

ARTIST . CURATOR
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