Why I'm making animist images

A while ago I put up a post asking questions as to why artists continue to need to draw animals. I have also referred several times to the fact that I believe that many artists need to also be 'animists' if they are to make images that connect humans with the rest of the world. So I thought it is perhaps about time to revisit the subject.

I have been making a series of images that relate to my boyhood and the fact that for a while I had a Sooty puppet that I definitely in my mind entered into when I needed to commune with someone or something that was both other than myself and yet at the same time an extension of myself. My mother was a cinema usherette, sometimes her shift was still ongoing when primary school finished, and so I would be told to walk up to the Gaumont cinema and go in and wait for mom, who would collect me from the back row, as soon as her shift had finished. It was a magical time, watching films that were far too old for me, that were sometimes totally incomprehensible, but which were still amazing. Faces were huge things, the horrors of two people kissing on such a scale were intensely embarrassing for me, and everything was seen as always in those days through a haze of cigarette smoke. To protect me though I had Sooty and Sooty would watch the films for me, he would interpret and go places I couldn't, sometimes in my mind even leaving my hand and engaging directly with the film world. Looking back at the way I related to this small golden coloured puppet bear, I suspect my relationship with it was little different to that of people who believe in animist practices.

Native Americans believe the spirits of animals and associated spiritual powers dwell within animal fetishes. These powers may be invoked to aid and guide the possessors of these fetishes, and in particular in North America there were six animals that were and I presume in some areas that are still occupied by indigenous peoples, still are, designated as being most powerful. They also acted as guardians of the six directions: North: Mountain Lion, West: Bear, South: Badger, East: Wolf and then the Zenith or upper region is guarded by the Eagle and finally the Nadir or lower region is presided over by the Mole. As well as these guardian duties these animal spirits also take on wider roles, so that for instance the eagle is the messenger between Earth dwellers and the spirits above. The bear as well as being a guardian of the west, has an ability to pass on to its fetish owner a portion of its own strength, it is supposed to help in processes of introspection and can use its spiritual strength to help empower the soul of whoever is locked into the bear/human fetish relationship and in this way the bear is also able to help lighten emotional burdens.  

Bear and other fetishes are still being made, especially by Zuni craftspeople, an indigenous people who not only made fetishes for their own use, but for other tribes as well. 

Zuni Turquoise Bear Fetish by Leekya Deyuse, c.1940

The bear fetish above was carved from a single piece of natural blue turquoise with a brown matrix. Attached to the bear with sinew is a shell carved into an arrowhead form and 'heishi' beads. The tying of these objects to the fetish would have allowed the bear's power to be absorbed into the tightly connected objects. For instance the beads might eventually become attached to a bracelet, the bear's power then would help protect the bracelet wearer.
My earliest memories of associations with what I now think of as being animal fetishes, were of a stuffed octopus and my Sooty puppet. Both these creatures played a powerful role in my adjustment to the world around me and they mediated between the known and unknown, as I began to make sense of who and what I was.

Ceramic octopus fetish made from a memory of a fabric one

Ceramic Sooty fetish made from a memory of a fabric one

As a man remembering being a boy

Sooty in the cinema

Looking back I can now see what was going on as a type of powerful fetish magic, especially as Sooty was supposed to be a magician. By casting my mind back into the world of a young boy, if I try hard enough I can begin to believe again, or at least get a sense of what these fetishes meant to me at the time. Although many people will I know see these images as childish things, I see them as intimations of a type of innocence we lose as we get older and by taking them very seriously, I am trying to re-create the intensity of the feeling tone of the time and am suggesting that it only takes a moment's reflection to step sideways and back into an older world when animist beliefs were central to everyone's experience. 

Sooty interjecting into various events

The more I try to make images that represent the spiritual or psychic power that I felt Sooty represented to myself as a boy, the more I find myself trying to build an intensity of colour to suggest the heightened emotional feeling tones that were associated with those very intense experiences. However if I am to take this even further I decided that I needed to appropriate what is usually seen as the most spiritual form of religious image construction, stained glass window making. 

Therefore the next series of posts will be my attempt to explain how I managed to achieve this with a bursary from AN (The artist's newsletter).

See also:

Why draw animals?

Drawing elephants and other animals

Animism and drawing

Invisible forces