ABSTRACT
The practices of psychoanalysis and of art are both concerned with making meaning, with finding forms fit to contain, represent, transform, and communicate experience. This chapter presents images from that exhibition, Transitional/Transitive. This body of work takes as its point of departure Winnicott's notion of transitional phenomena, located in the intermediate space between the inner world of subjectivity and the external world, between subject and object. His concept of potential space provides a fruitful way of imagining that space of paradox and play from which art, and all human creativity, emerges. The work investigates questions of contradiction and paradox, creativity and destructiveness. As befits the territory of pre-linguistic, embodied experience under examination, materials were selected for their intuitive appeal as texture, alongside their transitional or in-between qualities. Concerned with transition, transformation, and process, the work is not fixed, its flexibility and mobility allow for change, transformation, and reinterpretation. It can never be installed in precisely the same way twice.
