Review: Teresa Posyniak’s Abyss

By David Garneau
Artichoke Spring 1993

It is often said that works of art speak for themselves. If true, it should also be said that the language of a work of art is only comprehensible to those who try to learn its unique dialect and history. If art·works ever speak fluently, it is only to each other: for us, they are always in translation, ambiguous communications made to speak the viewer's desires before their own. Fortunately, art works have authors: the individual artist who made the work and the culture that made her. And the closer the viewer is to the artist's culture and experience, the closer they are to the dialect of the art work. 

However, there are always gaps between viewers and artists: moments where the viewer has to extend himself or herself in silence, listening rather than explaining. This is especially the case when men discuss the work of women artists who are exploring their different experiences. It has been art history's habit to read individual works of art into a single progressive, universal and masculine narrative; a habit which makes learning and appropriating that history easy, but which has not accommodated voices and stories alternative to those who compose the master narrative. Recently, many women artists have found the courage to abandon masculinist art traditions and have endeavored to represent and express their different histories and experiences. 

ln her large drawing, Abyss, Teresa Posyniak breaks from the gorgeously mute world of abstract art she inhabited for a decade and makes an explosive gesture toward articulating the experience of motherhood. In her artist's statement, Teresa explains that: 

survival and self-preservation have, for a long time, been themes in my work. When I became the mother of two children in my late thirties, the effect upon myself and my work was dramatic. I began for the first time in ten years to incorporate the human figure into the imagery. It felt like I was "filling in the blanks," answering long awaited questions. Abyss is the synthesis of a series of drawings and paintings which dealt with the fears—both real and perceived—of the experience of motherhood. We discover that our joy can be matched by its converse—horror and despair. Abyss was created section by section, becoming a journey into the psychological feel of motherhood. 

The ten year period Posyniak refers to includes many years of institutional art study at a time (as though anything has changed) when the study and practice of art was dominated by men and a masculine aesthetic; dominated by the assumption that the artist, like art history, was male and that only the aestheticized, visualized female body, rather than the experience of having a female body, could be the subject of art; an aesthetic that encouraged Posyniak to abandon her figurative work and social interests. It took profound encounters with her own body [motherhood] for the artist to 'figure' "the blanks" and return to the initial impulses that brought her to art. 

Abyss began before the birth of her children and continued through their early childhood. It functions as a document of the artist's negotiation to figure her personal experiences into her art: to claim her production back to herself. Abyss is a strange, authentic-gesture. The desire and ability to make beautiful surfaces is met by the greater, emotional need to signify, to tell the truth, to reveal the pain, the anxiety. The result is a work that is at war with its competing desires. It is itself an enactment of the experience of the abyss, "the primal chaos” (O.E.D.), the creative struggle between form and meaning. 

Abyss is an installation consisting of 12 panels and two hand-made paper columns with concrete bases. Each panel is a drawing/painting on heavy-weight Stonehenge paper mounted on an eccentrically shaped Fomecore and styrofoam support. The sections fit together to form an ambitious drawing which, in this incarnation, is about thirty feet long and seven feet high. While not necessarily complete (Posyniak may add more sections), its riot of fractures are kept from chaos by the horizontal thrust of the drawing's controlling gesture; a recumbent sprawl suggestive of both prairie landscape and the textscapes of sentences. 

First exhibited this spring at the Edmonton Art Gallery, Abyss spanned a wall of an upper balcony overlooking the exposed stairway that is the centre of that building. A disadvantage of this arrangement is that a viewer must stand either within six feet of the piece, too close to see the whole thing, or stand on the other side of the stairwell, some forty feet away. On the other hand, such close proximity also affords the viewer a site not unlike the conditions of the studio, where the artist is rarely able to see the whole thing at once and at a distance. And because the viewer comes to the drawing from one end or the other and not in the middle, the environment hints that the panels make up a narrative or sentence that reads from right to left or left to right. 

While the work can be read in innumerable ways, there is a strong right-to-left narrative that roughly corresponds to the historical stages of execution. The far-left panel is in the style of Posyniak's abstract work of the mid-eighties. Like its counterpart, on the far right, and in eerie contrast to all that is between, this section is aligned to the dominant art of mid-century, the convention of the rectangle and the benign pleasures of abstract mark making. The facility of the drawing, the fluent, solipsistic swirl of dry and wet media, creates a beautiful form that stands alone—the hollow vortex of its own private language—isolated from the discourse of the rest of the installation. This phallic form, like the "establishment” painting (painting establishment) it seems to both represent and embody, stands erect in protected oblivion. A huge, unsubtle, wall keeps the crush of figures—women, children, reality—from invading its space, from challenging its splendid isolation, its authority. 

The second section, from the painted wall to the thinnest part of the drawing, is a cacophony of marks in a variety of media. It is as if after years of living and painting in the realm of abstraction—not the abstraction from life to art, from the language of the body to the materials of art, but the autistic, disconnected and addictive pleasure of making marks for their own sake—the artist has unleashed the repressed figures of her unconscious. Or, more accurately, she gives explosive form to the repressed and dispossessed figures of actual, suffering "others;" people and experiences unknowable in the language of abstract art. The "unconscious" of abstract art is the material reality of people who do not live within the borders of its aesthetic discourse. 

Many of the crushed figures of this section are wrapped in bandages, or they are partially obliterated by white paint. The figures seem to be struggling from paint into form, and the forms they take are muted and oppressed. There are indeterminate scenes that are suggestive of violence. Of special interest is the centre of this section in which a large figure and a child are caught in the vortex of what might be a bird's eye-view of the abstract form of the first section. ls this an abduction? A rescue? Near the edge of the yellow wall is an abstract form that, with its gothic arch shape, is reminiscent of a church window. This may be, a pun associating abstract painting to stained glass windows, and the institutionalized authority of abstract art (at least in the prairies) with hierarchical, patriarchal and colonial forms of Christianity.

The third section, from the thin portion to the pillars, is a tumultuous melee of gestural brush strokes, oil stick and pastel marks that are, in the top portion, suggestive of bones, and in the lower, dark region, resolve themselves into a bizarre mass of babies. This collage of babies contains some of the surer drawing of the piece, but it is the strange subject that demands attention. Are these "lost" babies? A contemporary re-picturing of Charles Kingsley’s Victorian Water Babies fantasy? As a mother and as a spokesperson for the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Abortion Rights League, Posyniak is concerned about children born into situations that cannot support them: 

Babies floating under the surface in the dark, trying to survive—every mother's nightmare, that her child will not survive. I did this part when my daughter was only six months old and my son just two years old. The fragility of their lives, and their dependence upon me was astonishing to me. I am their protector and nurturer and they are fortunate to have a strong one. But what of the children who don't have that support system? 
[FROM THE ARTIST'S DIARY) 

The horizontal flow of the drawing is violently disrupted by two pillars. Rendered in cast hand-made paper, the pillars are like faux ruins. Their poorly made concrete footings cast the authenticity and strength of the pillars in doubt, perhaps calling into question the Greco-Roman authority on which western culture is based. The image between the pillars is the most overtly disturbing of the installation. A shrouded woman holds what appears to be a partially clad, dead child, while behind them a death figure looms threateningly. Posyniak explains that the image is based on a photograph of the aftermath of the cyclone which claimed the lives of thousands of people in Bangladesh several years ago. This is the point in the drawing where abstraction has been most clearly abandoned as the ruling desire. It is also, in my opinion, a difficult passage because it has not fully committed itself to resolving the problems of the figure, and the onerous task of resolving social criticism and artistic form. The wonderful contour lines that made the drawing of the babies so articulate, here does not serve the figure, causing the image to verge on being cartoon-like. Perhaps the problem is the classic one of making a beautiful picture of an ugly thing. Posyniak's considerable skill does not yet seem able to negotiate a way through this difficult sort of passage. 

On the other hand, the next section, with its reclining naked woman, has managed to combine the pleasure of mark making with a meaningful representation. The woman's form reads back into the foregoing as a index. She seems to be the anxious embodiment of her issue. ls this the artist? A figure for all women? Wrapped in her own embrace as if to comfort or control herself, she is the counterpart to the abstract form in the first panel. This drawing expresses anxiety, the fear of loss, of helplessness; a description, not a prescription; the embodiment of personal and maternal fears. 

When one becomes a mother, she is spun into a vast pool of conflicting emotions, a brilliant kaleidoscope of love for her children in which tremendous joy can be experienced, and then, that black void of fear as the child grows and becomes vulnerable to all that can hurt him or her. 
[FROM THE ARTIST'S DIARY] 

As l suggested, the final panel echoes the first. Sperm-like letter's crawl, like the sheer weight of inscribed history, across and down the page into a chaotic blur. The equation that brings together sperm, text and abstract painting is highly provocative; but I think it would be a mistake to read this work as only critical. Abyss is an attempt by a woman to paint her way through traditional art language into her own/female/mother's voice.  

This article first appeared, and is here reproduced by kind permission, from Extension: A Quarterly Journal Published by The Print And Drawing Council of Canada, Vol.2. #2,Winter 1992.