SHERRY ERSKiNE & IGUANA COLLABORATIVE

REMARKS

“RELAY–DELAY is a dreamlike interdisciplinary work comprising video accessed by a QR code, alongside photographs and installation.”

– Aesthetica Magazine, 2022, Art Prize, Finalist Profiles, York, United Kingdom.

“So much to love here: the color palettes, the robes, the pace, the layers with branches reflected in flowing water that look like capillaries of an eye, the natural sounds.  Each clip is a microworld.  Really great digital work and concept collaboration here.”

– Farzad Mahootian, 2021, Clinical Associate Professor, Global Liberal Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, New York University, New York, New York.

“I was instinctively drawn to many elements: the darkened, threshold place, the cocoon wrap of fabric, the pulse of the primordial, the movement from constraint to beckoning transformation. For me, ‘The Imaginal Stage’ evoked a feminine version of Lazarus, the raising up of the sacred and powerful and mis-understood feminine from the shadows. Full of wonder and mystery, sadness and power.”

– Maura Conlon-McIvor, 2018, PhD, Depth Psychology, Portland, Oregon. Website

[Excerpt] “… Carl Jung maintained that “life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which are yet one.” (1) We can never say with any certitude what the journey has been about, but the more you demark the stages of your lived existence, the more likely it is that you can shed the detritus of the past, and begin the process of letting go and of transformation.

Sometimes the mask of the self sticks.

Sometimes it becomes the projection of an illusory self.

Sometimes we remain lost.

If there is conscious interrogation of the self then there is the possibility of ultimately determining a substantive presence, or as Jung might say; “only the man or woman who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality.” (2)

A number of years ago I was near the village of Caberets in central France and I went to visit the cave system of Pech Merle, and saw the dappled horses and the fallen man, and the ghost prints of hands. The pairings of animals alluded to an architectural order, a placement of polarities, of light and dark, dry and moist, male and female, bison and stag. In this theatre of signs, and symbols, and archetypes, it was apparent that it was a livid backdrop to ritual, to ritualised enactments played out in the light of grease flares, and to the thrum of a shamanistic beat.

With these [artists] we have something akin to that ancient desire to dance in a shamanistic arena and move beyond the boundaries of the encoded self to a more capacious self -knowing, self- grounded and liberated personality that fearlessly remembers and fearlessly forgets. All of the marks, all of the exposures, all of the vulnerabilities these three artists display relate to the organic tensions of their lived realities.

…With Sherry we return to the territory of the cave, and ultimately to the territory of the self. The enshrouded self, the unwrapped self, and ultimately the enraptured self, unfurling and exploring stratas of air. Here is the guided presence, the dualities of self prefigured and incorporated, the enabled journey finally undertaken.” 1) Carl Jung, Letters Vol I. 2 Carl Jung, The Development of Personality.

– Frank Golden, 2017, Writer and Educator, County Clare, Ireland.

"Sherry Erskine takes us deep underground, into the caves of the Burren in her video, performance and installation works. Exploring Jungian archetypes the cave becomes a ritual space, where the self not only retreats to, but emerges from in a transformed state."

– President Mary Hawkes-Greene, 2017, Burren College of Art, County Clare, Ireland.

“PsychLoRama depicts the movement and the struggle of the self across the process of individuation, the larval and imaginal stage of self-formation, through which one sheds the darkness of the cocoon to gain a hard-wrought emergence into a new and more brilliant light.”

– Martin Meyler, 2017, Integrative Psychotherapy, County. Galway, Ireland

"Transformation is at the core of the work of Sherry Erskine. In her multi-disciplinary practice involving collaboration, lens-based media, performance and video installation she plumbs the depths of the unconscious to simultaneously uncover and expand a deeply personal mythology. Through travelling through and engaging with the underground world of the Burren’s cave systems, she explores a performative process that traverses the poles of fear and security. In her performance and video works these underground passages become multi-layered sites for the ritual exploration of identity, fluidity and personal transformation."

– Dean Conor McGrady, 2017, Burren College of Art, County Clare, Ireland.