Awakening the Mind and the Body

The works of Jules Allan

Jules Allan: Tendresse

One can sense the energetic shifts that awaken perceptions when viewing Jules Allan's paintings. They starkly remind us that art plays on the conscious and unconscious mind. Jules' dual practices as an artist and art psychotherapist, without doubt, inform one another.

We can draw parallels to the concepts of neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio, who has dedicated his life to explaining how consciousness is created. He is concerned with what happens when our bodies interact with the world and what those experiences are.

He gives us some insight when he says in his book The Feeling of What Happens: Body Emotion in the Making of Consciousness:

Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere. The screening is not necessarily intentional — we are not deliberate obfuscators all of the time — but deliberate or not, the screen does hide. 

He goes on to say,

One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.

Jules Allan: Renewal

He seems to suggest that we construct screens as barriers. Somehow, these screens can also be referred to as layers, perhaps the clothing and our skin, the outer layer of our bodies.

Jules's subject matter is often related to mortality, sexuality and the vulnerability of the human body. Although her work has a human presence, the forms she uses are not human shapes as such. They relate to the body rather than representing it directly. The forms are fragile or tough, are blurred or have edges, and are separate or merged. Each abstract painting establishes its own identity.

She paints by slowly building up layers and then scraping them back to reveal new interactions between the materials. By layering, scraping, and dissolving the paint, residual glimpses and traces of what lies beneath appear. It is intensely physical; reactions between materials, such as the chemical resistance of oil and acrylic paint, are fundamental to the work, rooting it in oppositional forces and creating tension between structure and flux, control and chaos. In this way, process and meaning co-exist and is like memory-making. Often, a grid pattern underlies the layers; this becomes the basic framework, literally in terms of paint and metaphorically in terms of a molecular, cellular

Jules Allan: Fusion