Lynn Millette
Interior experience
2003-2007
I have often wondered about this place that is my body through which I see and feel the world. My mind is where all that I know can be called upon when I want to understand yet so much more about myself remains hidden to my consciousness. There sleeps in the mind all of life’s lived experiences and many memories that may never be recalled to consciousness. I suspect that what drives me to make art is related to the desire to remember. As an artist, I make meaning on the canvas that echoes my interest in creative phenomena. My focus remains on the interrelationship between my inner and outer perception, which has broadened my awareness of life as I sense it through my body.
My imagination brings to mind shapes and surfaces related to my interior experiences. I express through paint what I feel and live inside, but cannot see. As I bring the outside world inward through my senses, my mind thinks of the past and the future, but my body remains in the present. As I stand outside, I know that my intelligence is different from the natural world and that it is through my physical body that I relate to the environment. I am engaged within life’s cycles and like the leaf on the tree that falls to the ground, my body will also expire one day.
Through my process, I consider the surface of the canvas as a place to connect, intersect, weave or knot things together. I express physical states like, tension, pressure, tightness, and other human phenomena like, intuition or projection. I think of systems, their relatedness and differences. Some are hidden to the eye while others permeate the environment. Beneath me, I imagine cables, lines and other networks like nerves, veins and tissue. Things that I think about when I express the life that lives inside my body are all around me: channels, caves, stitches, loops, roots and vines.
Lynn Millette 2006