Art and Chaos1
Marie-Christine Press
University of Westminster
Many artists believe in the power of the unconscious as conceptualised by Freud and others
to nurture (and occasionally hinder) their creative efforts. Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate,
quoted Jung in a recent interview to explain his passion for fishing and nature, in terms of
healing, reconnecting with parts of himself which pre-date language, « levels of awareness
and interconnectedness within »2. In letters they exchanged during their 20-year friendship3,
the detective novelist Georges Simenon and the filmmaker Federico Fellini often discussed
the question of artistic creativity. Fellini wrote to his friend about a dream he had at a time of
dark despair before embarking on a new film. He dreamt of a monk who turned out to be
Simenon himself, banging away on a typewriter while a voice explained to Fellini; « He is
painting his new novel, you see, a magnificent novel about Neptune ». The next day, Fellini
wrote, his depression lifted, and making the film no longer seemed an impossible task. His
project felt alive, deep inside him, just like Neptune living in the depths of the ocean.
These two instances capture something of the hold that the « discovery » and study of the
unconscious in psychoanalytical theory have gained on common representations of human
activity, not least in the domain of artistic creativity. I too am interested in understanding
something of what seems to be involved in artistic creativity, in terms of the role of the
unconscious both in nurturing and blocking the creative process. What can it mean to trust in
the depth and darkness of apparently unreachable unconscious emotions? How can one let
go of all certainty, and allow new symbols to emerge and a new language to make sense?
What kind of fish does Neptune send up to the surface of the ocean? I would like to explore
these questions in the context of psychoanalytical concepts applied to my work, whether I
am trying to write an essay or paint, in the hope of coming closer to where mind and matter
can meet.
This essay has been written, or painted? – maybe woven... – in the spirit of a nomadic
journey that deliberately avoided preconceived formal highways. As Deleuze and Guattari
like to put it:
1
An earlier version of this text was written as a step towards an exploration of artistic
creativity, in the context of an MA in Applied Arts and Visual Culture. The title « Art and
Chaos » simply emerged from the writing itself, and from an intuition that chaos was a
powerful metaphor through which to explore the creative process. I have since developed
paintings that explore a range of abstract forms of inner and outer landscapes, in terms of body
sensations, rhythms, impressions and memories.
2 « Poet, pike and a pitiful grouse ». The Guardian Saturday Review, 9 January 1999, pp. 12.
3 « Carissimo Simenon, Mon cher Fellini », Correspondance établie par Cla ude Gauteur et
préfacée par Jacqueline Risset, Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 1999.
© La Chouette, 2001
2
One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive
thresholds of deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that
simultaneously define complementary, sedentary reterritorializations.4
There has been much groping in the dark and fumbling for words and for meaning in order to
remain faithful to an unfolding process of clarification. In a sense this process images the
journey that I undertook when I set out blindly to « paint landscapes », only to stumble upon
what felt like insuperable obstacles. On the journey, I have had to take deep breaths to find
the inspiration that can breathe new life into conscious thought. In both cases, conclusions
can only be modest, tentative, provisional, in the sense that I have tried to invent new
landscapes or territories for myself. As Lyotard observes:
A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he
writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished
rules [...] Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking
for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to
formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work
and text have the characters of an event.5
My starting point was a preoccupation with the subject of landscape. The subject almost
imposed itself to me in relation to a desire to develop painting, and it felt right at the time even
though it was a rather blind choice. However, I found myself unable to do very much that I
could enjoy with this « feeling » for landscape; so I needed to make sense of what I was
looking for in landscape painting, and why my aim was proving so elusive. Ideas began to
emerge around landscape containing a metaphor of a relationship between myself and the
outside world, as a way to deal with dichotomies of mind-body, reason-feeling, consciousunconscious, spirit-matter, I-other, « Aesthetic Man » and « Economic Man ».6 I was helped
in this when reading a study by Anne Raine of the work of the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.7
Mendieta performed a kind of land art, which she documented in photographs: ephemeral
situations in the landscape, sometimes of her own naked body mingling with natural objects –
leaves, twigs, mud, etc.; sometimes mere silhouettes of a body, an imprint or a trace in the
sand. To me, her images appear powerfully uncanny, in a way that resonates on many levels.
I also have a deep sense of the remarkable « fit » of Anne Raine’s reading of Mendieta’s
images. She uses a psychoanalytical model developed by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger in
contrast to Freud’s theory of the constitution of the ego. According to Lichtenberg Ettinger,
the founding experiences of the self happen before birth, in the womb symbolised in her
model as the « matrix ». Feelings of difference within sameness are registered at an
unconscious level, sameness mingling with otherness, and pleasure with anxiety, experienced
by the developing fœ tus in a tactile encounter with the « m/other » in the womb. Thus, the
individual’s subjectivity constitutes itself in non-confrontational negotiation between the « I »
(self) and the « non-I » (mother). These founding experiences remain in the individual’s
4 A Thousand Plateaus, p. 54.
5 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. 81.
6 « [W]e cannot submit to be divided into “Aesthetic Man” and “Economic Man” ». Raymond
Williams. The Long Revolution, p. 54.
7 Raine, A: « Embodied geographies: subjectivity and materiality in the work of Ana
Mendieta », in Generations and geographies in the visual arts, pp. 228-49.
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unconscious throughout their lives, and become symbolised in imagination and cultural
production.
Ana Mendieta’s images evoke these « matrixial aspects » of same/other: the presence of
both the female body and nature (leaves, flowers, mud, stones, etc.) occupying the same
space without threat. There is also a strong evocation of the experience of being totally
immersed in the action of making an object, drawing or painting. As Adrian Stokes remarks,
we never quite lose this sense of « the pleasurable absence of self in a merging with the
object [...] since it belongs to a variety of normal somatic experiences at their best ».8
However, I could not ignore the uncanny impact of Ana Mendieta’s images. It remained, like
a thread to be picked up and followed into the labyrinth. It echoed a strange anxiety I have
experienced at times in connection with familiar landscapes, something about a sense of
security that could shatter at any moment. Around that time I also experienced a parallel loss
of trust in my capacity to ever get to grips with painting, a feeling that was perhaps
precipitated by the absence of strong structures within which to explore these developments.
Could this painful time of disillusionment be related to my experience as a « stranger » in this
country, something that I have always sought to minimise? Was it perhaps connected to
« being a foreigner to the art of landscape painting »? Could there be a subtle connection
between disillusionment, (lack of) creativity and an (in)ability to manage complex feelings
around separateness, foreignness, separation? This very intricate area seemed to connect
with many aspects of my experience in the world – a true « complex » in the Jungian sense of
the term. I needed to tease out its main strands in order to try and make some sense of it.
What I now understand more clearly is that those feelings experienced in the outer world are
the manifestations of conflicts in the inner world. Those are indeed intimately connected with
creativity and the ability to use and produce « objects », and I now see ambivalence as their
common denominator. I shall now try and retrace some rather labyrinthine connections.
The first strand, as already explained, is manifest in the powerful feeling of uncanniness which
Ana Mendieta’s haunting images evoke in me. This has led me to explore the « uncanny » as
conceptualised by Freud, and which Julia Kristeva takes up in a reflection around the theme
of « foreignness ».9 The second strand concerns my inability to paint, and more generally a
consideration of obstacles to creativity as studied by Marion Milner, a psychoanalyst
concerned with the process of symbol-formation and its impact on the creative process. Her
contribution is particularly precious, as she dared to bring her intellect and knowledge as a
psychoanalyst to bear on her own experience of the creative process. Both explorations
provide a compelling illustration of the idea that what is experienced « outside » is a mirror
of, or even better a door to the « inside », the unconscious.
Regarding, then, the « uncanny », it seems significant that Freud should have chosen the
domain of aesthetics to elaborate this concept.10 Starting from a semantic analysis of the
8 Three Essays on the Painting of Our Time, p. 31.
9 Julia Kristeva: Etrangers à nous-mêmes (transl. Strangers to Ourselves); p. 269ff.
10 « The Uncanny », in Art and Literature, p. 339. As explained in the English translation of
Freud’s paper: « The German word, translated throughout this paper by the English “uncanny”,
is “unheimlich”, literally “unhomely”. The English term is not, of course, an exact equivalent of
the German one. »
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German words « heimlich » (meaning homely) and its opposite « unheimlich », Freud
shows how the two words can exhibit identical shades of meaning, i.e. concealed, secret
and dangerous.11 His fascinating analysis of dictionary definitions and instances of
uncanniness in literature leads to the psychoanalytical concept of the « uncanny » as an
experience of anxiety around something which is secretly familiar, which has been
« forgotten » and should have remained hidden, but returns in a disturbing or frightening
manner. In Freud’s view, the immature, narcissistic ego, expels « bad » feelings (about death,
castration, etc.) and projects them outside onto the « figure » of a double – an evil,
threatening being or object. It becomes clear from his elaboration that the experience of the
« uncanny » as an external phenomenon in fact originates « inside » us from unconscious
material. Whether or not one subscribes to the notion of infantile fears revolving around death
and castration (or other forms of negativity) being projected out onto an outside « object »
(or « part-object » – Melanie Klein’s « bad breast » for instance), it does seem that the
feeling of the uncanny is, as Kristeva argues, a metaphor of the workings of the psyche: what
was once familiar has been repressed and made « foreign », strange, uncanny. In that sense,
we can be « strangers to ourselves ». A semiology of the « uncanny » suggests that it is
connected with situations where boundaries become uncertain, and are thus experienced as
threatened in some way. The frontier between animate and inanimate, between reality and
imagination, is unexpectedly abolished – as in childhood games, or in animism. The American
tourist pointing to a painting next to me in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
Edinburgh, brutally undermined my sense of reality when I realised that he and his companion
were in reality exhibits, two perfectly life-like models by Duane Hanson. What also appears
to be at stake in the experience of the « uncanny » is the threatened breakdown of
boundaries between reality and symbols, precipitating the experience of a disintegration of
the self, as in madness or death.
My experience also tells me something else, which goes back to the resonance of Ana
Mendieta’s work. Her images both attract as much as they haunt me. This suggests that their
« uncanny » impact is not only about the fear of disintegration of boundaries, but also about
its seduction. I believe it could be expressed in terms of an « attraction-repulsion »: the
attraction of a blissful return to the matrixial unity, to a non-conflictual experience of the
« I/other » (the « me/other » – mother) in the womb. This is powerfully expressed in Ana
Mendieta’s images of her animate body in nature. This is where I want to be with my own
work: the landscape/nature as my refuge, my shelter, my container, a concrete and symbolic
way of abolishing sterile and harmful dichotomies. In the landscape/nature I can work with
my mind and my body, I can enjoy thought and feeling, I can be in culture and nature, « I »
can be « other ». And yet there is, at one and the same time, an equally powerful fear of
disintegration, of reverting to an inanimate state of nature that I experience in those images
where the body is nature – stones, leaves, the branches of a tree, or images where nature has
absorbed the body into itself: all that remains is a shape in the mud, a piece of cloth in the
sand – a ghost. The brutal question then arises: could it be that my home, my container is also
my grave? How then could I possibly try and paint what could swallow me up whole? Is
paint like mud, or sand – quicksand perhaps? Can I stand this? And yet I love the feel of
sand on my body; I have moulded shapes and turned bowls in clay; I love the smell, the
11 « Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence,
until it finally coincides with its opposite unheimlich » (ibid., p. 347)
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sheen and drag of paint across the canvas. Their sheer materiality is profoundly satisfying, in a
way perfectly expressed by Marion Milner:
[W]hen painting something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a
fusion into a never-before-known wholeness; not only were the object and
oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation
and feeling and action. All one’s visual perceptions of colour, shape, texture,
weight, as well as thought and memory, ideas about the object and action
towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in
the “thusness” of the thing, they all seemed fused in to a wholeness of being
which was different from anything else that had ever happened to me.12
Marion Milner came to the experience described here after a meticulous exploration of her
inability to paint as she wished. Her analysis helped me tie up a few strands of my own. An
ambivalence now emerged for me around landscape as a container, both desired and
threatening, and therefore unconsciously rejected – but experienced as rejecting. What she
describes above is an experience of fusion, an intense concentration that I have known from
making objects – weaving textiles, turning pots, drawing or painting life models – whatever
the objective quality of my work to others. But if I was scrupulously honest about landscape
painting, this had never really happened. And it was not going to happen until I was able to
let go of the idea of painting landscapes, and started to deconstruct the whole edifice. I had
to stop trying, and start doing just what I liked, as I liked, in the landscape. I found that I
wanted to sit on the ground and work mostly in charcoal and pastels, doing quick sketches
that felt right, exciting and energetic. I sensed there was a lesson in there somewhere, to do
with the rightness of subject and materials: no longer paints and canvasses and easels, nor
suitably inspiring « views », but the most basic instruments for quick mark-making on paper;
a focus on immediacy, and more textural and sculptural qualities in the landscape, particularly
of trees and rock – old, gnarled apple trees; dark, ancient yews; bright red ochre quarries;
stark granite. Why trees and rocks? I was nonplussed and secretly disappointed. I felt
unhappy with all the associations with traditional symbols of rootedness, solidity and
dependability of family, tradition, age and wisdom, etc., until the sudden, happy realisation
that I had « removed » those trees and rocks from the all-embracing context of the
landscape. I had appropriated them for my own ends, and I could make them symbols of my
own newly found creative roots. This only happened after further exploration around ideas of
spontaneity, chaos and symbols.
As Ana Freud points out in a foreword to Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint,
there is a sense in which the creative process of the artist is like the analytical process: both
require a framework in which « it is safe to be absent-minded », and a willingness to
« accept chaos as a temporary stage ».13 When she decided to use free drawing as a method
for understanding why she could not paint as she wanted, Marion Milner discovered that a
capacity to play forms an integral part of a capacity to be creative. But play is a serious
matter, and the creative process is fraught with danger. If the danger seems too great, then
creativity will be impaired. Where, then, are the dangers and the obstacles? When trying to
create something, we are engaging every aspect of ourselves: « Ultimately then it is perhaps
ourselves that the artist in us is trying to create ».14 For creativity to flourish, she sees the need
12 On Not Being Able to Paint, p. 142.
13 Ibid., p. xiii.
14 Ibid., p. 136.
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for a basic willingness to accept a temporary blurring of our certainties, our mental
boundaries: to enter the world of the child where, through play, « dream and reality are
fused ».15 It allows our dream to become part of our reality; it enables spontaneous,
unconscious ordering forces to « come into play », to interact with our conscious, reasonable
social selves in a creative dialogue, a fruitful reciprocity. Yet allowing oneself to play, to do
what one likes, as the child who can totally immerse herself in the temporary fantasy of a
game, can appear very dangerous to the adult. In our culture, it is not generally encouraged
as part of adult « work » and it tends to be confined to the separate compartment of
« leisure ». Moreover, if playing is a form of absent-mindedness, does it not mean losing
one’s mind in some way? (« de-lira, leaving the furrow, is the etymology of “delirium” ».)16 If
it means letting go of certainties, it can be experienced as a plunge into the abyss of undifferentiation which, as we know, can be terrifying. Myths talk of descending to the
underworld in order to be initiated into a new vision; of crossing the Acheron to earn the
prize of regeneration. Those are tales of darkness, terror and murder, as in the myth of « The
Descent of Inanna », the Sumerian goddess of heaven and earth who journeys into the nether
world where Ereshkigal, her dark sister, kills her. Enki, the god of water and wisdom,
restores Inanna to life, « using two little mourners he creates from the dirt under his
fingernail ».17 This myth speaks eloquently of the violence that has to be done for new life to
happen – as every mother will know. It also offers the wonderful image of the little mourners
made from dirt – perhaps the fertile mud of the flood plains?, who are instrumental in bringing
Inanna back to life. It is also a remarkable anticipation of Freud, and subsequent
psychoanalytical work on mourning.
This question of mourning as a prerequisite for new life offers a way of comprehending the
huge difficulties one can sometimes encounter in producing objects, whether they are things
or ideas. Mourning is a universal phenomenon, and not limited to humans. It can be thought
of as a process of internal and external reorganisation during which enormous pain is
experienced about the loss of something of value – whether a person, an object, a way of life
or indeed a way of thinking. But the reorganisation is necessary for life to continue. As was
prefigured in myths and religions, psychoanalytical theory has shown that mourning is a
symbolic process as much as a real one. Marion Milner, like Melanie Klein and others, sees
the capacity to mourn – to accept loss –, and the attendant capacity to make symbols as a
crucial stage in the child’s normal psychic development. The process that leads to symbolformation has been variously conceptualised, as has the disturbance of this capacity as a
source of neurotic and psychotic disorders. Disturbances in a child’s development may
happen for a variety of reasons. For instance if the infant’s anxiety about separation from her
mother is too great, she may not be able to move to a more realistic position in relation to
« goodness » and « badness » inside and outside herself. In order to protect herself from the
fear and pain of separation, and the disillusionment that it entails (what Melanie Klein would
call the depressive position), the infant is likely to maintain a rigid split between contradictory
feelings in herself. Some things, people or events will thus be rigidly perceived as all-good
(the fairy godmother of fairy tales), while the rest will be all-bad (the wicked witch). Such
rigid, concrete perceptions are not a fertile terrain for symbol-formation, which entails an
15 Ibid., p. 93.
16 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language, p. 56.
17 Sylvia Brinton Perera. Descent to the Goddess, p. 10.
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ability of the psyche to accept the difference between one’s feelings of love or hatred and the
object of one’s love or hatred. In the context of a discussion on symbolism and mourning,
Hanna Segal writes:
Symbolism is a tripartite relationship: the symbol, the object it symbolises, and
the person for whom the symbol is the symbol of the object. [...] It is only with
the advent of the depressive position, the experience of separateness,
separation and loss, that symbolic representation comes into play.
Later on, she adds:
Artists in particular, when successful, combine an enormous capacity for
symbolic use of the material to express their unconscious phantasies with a
most acute sense of the real characteristics of the material they use. Failing
that second capacity they could not have used it effectively to convey the
symbolic meaning they embody. 18
This suggests that the creative process, like the child’s developmental process, involves a
capacity for realism. For the artist to be creative, he or she must be able to form symbols,
and to separate the symbolic value of the object of his or her phantasy from the actual object
itself. Put another way, there may exist an obstacle to the creative process because too much
illusion is invested in the object, thus making it particularly difficult to risk the disillusionment
that a separate creation would not fail to bring. Conversely, however, as Marion Milner
argues, the creative process requires the capacity to immerse oneself in the phantasy, in the
illusion that one can, if only for a moment, create the world. It requires bringing and holding
together the capacity to play and the capacity to work. Yet the effort to re-join what has
been carefully and « safely » kept apart can appear to endanger one’s sense of sanity.
Marion Milner talks of the ability to tolerate a kind of temporary madness. This feeling of
« losing one’s mind » while striving for wholeness is in fact twofold: there is a kind of
madness in the temporary illusion that one can make the world – the illusion of omnipotence.
There is also the maddening pain of disillusionment and mourning.
It does seem paradoxical that an effort to make oneself whole should induce a sense of
madness and disintegration, but is it not so precisely because we have been so thoroughly
trained to think in dualities and dichotomies? It seems impossible to hold one thing (play,
absent-mindedness...) and its opposite (work, concentration...) to be true at the same time.
And it seems impossible to experience the chaos of disintegration as anything other than a
kind of madness. In a conversation with Gilles Deleuze on the topic of the (mis)uses of
power, Michel Foucault19 says that « [i]t is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the
unconscious ». His remark concerns the (semi-open?) secret of the power in the hands of
hugely repressive forces, agencies and institutions in society – such as prisons and,
interestingly, infant-schools. In such contexts it is indeed difficult, even dangerous for the
powerless (e.g. prison inmates, children) to challenge the institution since so many vested
interests dictate that its power should remain « secret », i.e. unnoticed, « hidden »,
« repressed », and « unsaid ». Likewise, it may be that obstacles to creativity become
particularly difficult to overcome when the unconscious life harbours the heavy secret of
18 Dream, Phantasy and Art, pp. 38-41.
19 « Intellectuals and Power », in Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and
Culture, p. 14.
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tradition. Creativity, then, might be seen as dangerous, subversive, certain to destroy the
edifice and shatter its foundations.
I now understand something of the complex nature of the conundrum that blocked me for a
while, until I dared to let go of what I thought I knew and wanted. It happened at the level of
symbolisation: I had taken landscape to be my natural home and a symbolic framework for
my connection to life and goodness – through many memories and stories, most of which
lead me back to my paternal grandmother.20 However, when attempting to engage creatively
with the landscape, I had to be disillusioned on several counts before I could make anything
with it. I had idealised the landscape of artistic creativity in the form of landscape painting,
partly as a defence against the disillusionment from an original blissful experience. It was also
to act as an idealised compensation for the external impositions of a certain cultural tradition.
In the language of Melanie Klein, this had involved ferocious symbolic splitting – between
artistic creativity and the rigours of academia. I have now come to the provisional conclusion
that landscape painting is not quite the framework I want to operate in at present, artistically
or intellectually. I do not « believe » in a unified, God’s eye view of landscape any more, but
in fragments drawn from the chaos, thresholds between chaos and order, Joyce’s
« chaosmos », for which I am beginning to find my own kind of lines and textures. I also
subscribe to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s view of philosophical thought which does not bring its
concepts together in friendship without again being traversed by a fissure that leads them
back to hatred or disperses them in the coexisting chaos where it is necessary to take them
up again, to seek them out, to make a leap.21
There is art in chaos. I am now learning to draw lines that do not divide.
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20 My grandmother, the ultra-Catholic and dedicated fan of Napoleon, who after my birth
buried a piece of my umbilical cord under a rosebush in her garden...
21 What is Philosophy?, p. 203.
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REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bazaine, J. Exercice de la Peinture. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973.
Brinton Perera, S. Descent to the Goddess. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London:
The Athlone Press, 1988.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. What is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1994.
Ferguson, R. et al (eds.) Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New
York, 1990.
Freud, S. « The “Uncanny” » (1919), in Art and Literature. The Pelican Freud Library,
volume 14. London, Penguin, 1985.
Gomez, L. An Introduction to Object Relations. London: Free Association Books, 1997.
Jay, M. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought. London: University of California Press, 1993.
Jung, C. et al. Man and his Symbols. Pan Books, 1978.
Kristeva, J. Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by
Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981.
Kristeva, J. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayard, 1988.
Lecercle, J-J. The Violence of Language. London: Routledge, 1990.
Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984.
Milner, M. On Not Being Able to Paint. London: Heinemann, 1950.
Raine, A: « Embodied geographies: subjectivity and materiality in the work of Ana
Mendieta », in Generations and geographies in the visual arts, ed. Griselda Pollock.
London, Routledge, 1996.
Segal, H. Dream, Phantasy and Art. London: Routledge, 1991.
Stokes, A. Three Essays on The Painting of our Time. London: Tavistock Publications,
1961.
Williams, R. The Long Revolution. (Chatto & Windus, 1961) Pelican Books, 1971.
Marie-Christine Press
1. The old apple tree, 1998. Charcoal and Conté on paper, 75 cm x 55cm
2. Self-portrait 1, 2000. Oil on canvas, 71cm x 50,5 cm
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3. Tree stumps, 1997. Colour photographs on paper 15 cm x 10 cm each
[detail of Trees - bark, 1998, 1999].
4. Ochre quarries, 1998. Ochre, PVA, chalks on paper, 79 cm x 55,5 cm
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5. Self-portrait triptych (Inanna), 2000. oil on canvas, 71 cm x 50,5 cm each.
6. The Infant, 2000. Oil on canvas, 65 cm x 54 cm.
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7. Fragments (detail), 1999. Inks and watercolour on paper, 39 cm x 2 cm.
8. Maghreb, 2000. Oil on board. 67 cm x 61 cm.
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