The Haunted Self

The painting, The Haunted Self borrows its title from Onno van der Hart’s book on structural dissociation and complex PTSD. A still from the short film The Black Sun: Mise en Abyme is reproduced and transformed into a new painting. This process extends the self-reflective and recursive structure developed in the film through layers of work, media and meaning.

In my creative practice, I often extend and collapse the picture plane, exploring the intersection of illusion, perception, and reality. In this painting, the film functions as a temporal extension of the painting The Black Sun, while the painted film-still collapses that extension back into a static image. This process of transformation challenges and blurs the boundary between internal and external, representation and reality, reflecting the experience of dissociation, where the perception of reality becomes destabilised. Recursive witnessing involves repeated confrontations that move towards reintegration, mirroring the processes of individuation and trauma therapy. This process reveals how meaning is formed through cycles of reflection and reinterpretation.

The chair and easel, objects from my studio marked by traces of previous works, ground the image in lived experience. I am not seated in the chair, but I appear as a ghostly figure behind it, creating a spectral displacement. This displacement reinforces themes of dissociation and trauma’s fragmented nature. Presence and absence coexist as a threshold between the visible and the veiled, memory and materiality. The artist haunts the space, engaged in observation and reflection.

References

Moskowitz, A. (2007) ‘The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. By Onnovan der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis & Kathy Steele. W.W. Norton. 2006.