CUDDLEPUDDLE, Gallery Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam, NL
October 2018
This is where I am at:
Lately I have been searching for comfort. I’ve spent these past few months trying to find places, people, spaces, times both around me and in me that feel good and safe. I have been re- learning my self, re-stacking the layers that build me up. What do I need ? What do I want ? How can I feel secure about my world and my actions and my being ? When all seems to be falling apart around us, how do I do things right... ?
When you break it all down, comfort is a very layered and vast term. Emotional, financial, physical... these tiers all break down again and again and again. Where does the fantasy end and the reality of the situation begin?
I have been trying to have positive visualization in my life more often. I want to see what I want every single day. In the morning, in the night, while I eat my lunch. Perhaps I want it too much, the greener grass, and I don’t see what is actually in front of me.
I want to break down the layers, get each one to stand on its own. I want the projection, the reality, the fantasy, the potential to all sit next to each other and then become a whole.
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It was late and fuzzy. We all had taken something, had a long day, who knows what it was, but we all ended up here. There was an energy in the room, an electricity that was palpable. We wanted to be near each other, on each other, comforted by the heat of the beings by our side. We lay there, listening to the droning music, silent and content.
We have felt alien lately. Torn apart, split up, fractionalized and divided. We are tired. What anchors us to ourselves? What grounds us in reality vs. what do we project on to the other? These thoughts drift in and out of our minds all the time. All we know right now in this moment, is that we are in the room and we are together.
We are piled up - a puddle of being, a puddle of thought, a puddle of feeling.
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There is a term in psychology called Transference. It is this notion of transferring emotions you have towards one thing on to another. For example, a childhood memory of a parent on to a new lover. All of our desires toward the other stem from the comfort of the previous. When can does it transition from the old to the new? When does it stick? When does what I want become what I got?
When do the layers melt?
- Isabel Yellin
