Pietà - Tom Isaacs
(Videography by Danica Knezevic)
Here are some more images of my upcoming work for BLUE, curated by Beata Geyer, at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre which opens Saturday, 1 August.
And here is the short version of my artist’s statement:
Pietà is a performance art piece of variable length in which the artist explores different positions and poses with a long piece of blue felt. The colour blue has long held spiritual significance for different religious traditions thanks to its association with the vast expanse of sky and the unfathomable depths of the ocean. Blue is also commonly associated with sadness and depression, typified by the expression: ‘feeling blue’. On a personal level Pietà combines these two themes, mental health and spirituality, to evoke a desire for healing or resurrection from an experience of depression which feels deathly. Pietà also addresses the broader problems of alienation and fragmentation which, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, are an inevitable effect of the development of the ego and the acquisition of language. Pietà draws from the fields of ritual, psychoanalysis and art making, which have all been proposed, at one time or another, as solutions to these problems.
