What Inspired This Project?
Common phrases I used to say: I don't like people much, I am an introvert, I don't get angry, I am the peacekeeper, I am sensitive, I am flexible, I don't take much space, I can shut off my emotions, I don't care what people think of me, the people I love come before I do.
Common feelings/sensations I used to have: Too loud noises. Too many people. Too bright lights. Everything happens too fast, too soon, and too much.
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All the years of being the peacekeeper outside had lead me to forge an internal war, I was at war with myself, my inner critic was ravaging through an anxious body, and the anxious body was triggering ruminating thoughts.
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It took some major upheavals for me to begin to notice that I had been stuck in a state of survival that was keeping my nervous system in a hypervigilant mode. I didn't understand how my feelings of being "lost" and of awaiting some impending doom as well as my many health issues were just a few signs of how I had adapted to environments where my reality was denied and where I had felt unsafe.
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This art project has developed as a way for me to actively listen to what I am feeling and sensing. Every day, I begin again to befriend the various aspects within and I get to paint fun stuff along the way.
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Sketching into the Unknown
2021 Exhibition at Centre D'Art
Auroville
a little about me
Inconclusive information about this human
Lisa Suchanek is an artist born and raised in an international spiritual town in rural South India called Auroville. In the Netherlands, she received a Bachelors of Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as a Master of Arts in Media Studies where she specialised in sound. Although her work in media, philosophy and art seemed to fit her well, she felt something was missing. The last few years she has been curiously inquiring inwardly and outwardly into various body centered healing practices and psychological theories that embrace multiplicity. She gradually began to apply these modalities to her painting as a practice of embodiment, of unlearning, of self-discover and healing.
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P.S. She needed several burnouts and much heart ache to begin to live into a life that feels hers.
Why Felt Sense?
Eugene Gendlin (founder of focusing therapy) described the "felt sense" as a pre-verbal and unclear experience of implicit complexity and a holistic sense of what one is working on. Access to this bodily feeling is priceless as its unconscious interpretation is where a lot of inwardly disempowering/empowering stories are formed.
(I'm still working on how to describe this better with my own interpretation, as it is pre-verbal its a bit tricky, hehe)
