Brigid Rentoul (2)
mixed-media sculpture
Title Cogito, Ergo Sum
“I am not myself… When we lose our mind, where is it to be found? When we go out of our mind, where do we go?”
In the final year before her death my mother struggled with advancing vascular dementia. My piece shows order being re-placed by chaos as a result of the disease.
Decay is depicted in a series, analogising the gradual disintegration of cognitive function to the vivid bloom and withering of peonies. George Segal’s plaster figures and Antony Gormley’s full-size body casts inspired me to create my own plaster heads as the base structure for my final piece. Inspiration also came from totem poles as symbols of kinship, life and death, pointing heavensward but grounded in the earth. The breakdown of orderly thought processes and the encroaching confusion and chaos is portrayed as a vertical series in the form of a totem pole. The vertical stack of heads loosely secured by large pins felt precarious, like one’s grip on mental health.
I sought to represent what happens in the brain with wire and beads, initially straight and blood red but increasingly tangled and pale. The unravelling loss of self is depicted through carefully coiled strips of Descartes’ text becoming chaotic, unruly and elusive, flying away from the heads and turning from words on a page to free floating reordered words on transparent acetate.
Ordered thoughts in logical word sequences become a random scattering of unconnected words and the crisp labyrinth on the healthy head becomes a cut out ghost on tangled acetate attached to the final head.
“I enjoy the stimulation and discipline of an organised course. I intend to continue to challenge myself to grow and evolve my art; for my practice to become a regular occupation, providing space to reflect and another means of expression”