I cannot paint my life without painting Jurassic Park: personal mythology through pop culture

Through my work, I explore the link between popular culture and our inner worlds. After outlining personal experiences that have led to my inclusion of popular culture in my paintings, I will discuss the relevance of Winnicott’s ideas on object-relations theory and Freud’s theory of cathexis, or the emotional imprint we can assign to an object or person (McIntosh, 1993). For example, I discuss how I imprint psychic and emotional energy onto objects such as the film Jurassic Park (1993) in relation to a lost loved one, and discuss how 2 this links to Roland Barthes’ ideas around finding the ‘essence’ of his late mother through photography (Barthes, 1980). As my work is trying to describe an indescribable spiritual eternity, I will detail Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of language and its limitations (Homer, 2005). As my work expresses personal experiences through impersonal languages such as cultural symbolism and archetypes, Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology and its task of describing the aforementioned ‘eternity’ is a cornerstone of my research and I will use it to contextualize my thinking regarding spirituality and art. As I merge disparate cultural material such as film references to build my own worlds, I discuss how world-building is applied by the artist George Shaw, to begin to put my work into context with the contemporary art world. I interviewed the author and illustrator Graeme Base on his use of reference imagery and I will detail some of his responses while discussing my use of collage. I will then analyse the work of Flora Yukhnovich, who also uses cultural material in her paintings. Referring to Monika Krause’s research on the zeitgeist, I discuss how my artwork is inspired by the ‘course’, or journey that a zeitgeist takes (Krause, 2019, p6). Lastly, I will discuss my artwork going forward, potentially branching into new media as my creative work includes other modes of expression, such as filmmaking and songwriting, which could express the transmedia of world-building that is becoming prevalent in contemporary culture (Jenkins, 2007). Through my research into psychoanalytic theories and mythological metaphor, I seek to access a private well of meaning within popular culture to build my own world of mythology.