Contributing text from publication: "bears; truths..."
Transition Animal
And then there’s the bear, of a nature transformed: in myth and in metaphor, claws become ever sharper, fangs all the more grizzly; in plush and in storybook, button eyes are windows into the gentlest of hearts, ferociousness melts into tenderness. Few wild animals have captured humans’ symbolic imagination so much as the bear, and few have been subjected to such a broad spectrum of representations. As such, the family Ursidae is a blank canvas for the genus Homo, a surface onto which we have projected our fears and fantasies since the origins of our species—and into each next generation, each time we offer a teddy to a child’s eager embrace.
The teddy bear, of course, is a modern phenomenon, dating back only to that legendary day in November 1902 when Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt refused the unsportsmanlike opportunity to shoot a roped and wounded black bear while on a hunting trip in Mississippi. The president’s show of compassion was immortalized first in a popular Washington Post political cartoon, then in the form of a velvet bear sewn together by Rose Michtom, a Russian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. Rose and her husband Morris placed the bear in the window of their candy store with the label “Teddy’s Bear,” and soon thereafter the couple found their fortune in the toy manufacturing business, going down in history as the inventors of the teddy bear.
Between its reproductions in the narrative, the comic, and the attainment of the American Dream, what of the original, the flesh-and-blood black bear in the Mississippi swamps? That bear, as the story goes,
was old and fat and chased into a watering hole by the hunting party’s hounds, several of whom had already been fatally injured in the struggle to corner the animal and afford the president a moment of glory. So Holt Collier—the Civil War veteran, former slave, and experienced bear hunter who led the expedition—assumed the gruesome tasks of bashing the bear over the head with his rifle, tying it to a tree until the president arrived on the scene, and killing it with a knife after a struggle in the water, finally ending its misery after Roosevelt refused to draw his gun. More than a century and millions of mass-produced iterations later, is there anything left of that bear in our children’s teddies of today? Perhaps a little of its essence remains, as if through the process of homeopathic dilution; it is the spirit of a hapless creature who became the victim of circumstance, fallen prey to the strange whims and glories of human beings keen on making meaning for themselves.
That, indeed, is the spirit Kathy Clark makes manifest from the pre-loved stuffed bears she has collected, reassembled, and painstakingly revealed in her ambitious installation bears; truths… Like that bear, many of these teddies probably also found themselves in a critical place at a critical time: the moment when a child needed a form of comfort that no human caretaker could provide. Referring to the inanimate objects used to fill such voids, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term transitional object, now virtually synonymous with the teddy bear. In Winnicott’s view, there comes a point in early development at which the baby begins to realize that he or she is finite, a separate entity from Mother, who cannot fulfill every need at every instant. The blow of such an uncomfortable truth can be dampened if the child makes use of a transitional object of its own choosing, an object that serves as a stand-in for the relationship with Mother in light of her absence and her requisite inadequacy. It constitutes the first truly “not-me” phenomenon in the child’s consciousness, and it facilitates the development of abstract symbolic thought while at the same time providing an outlet for the child’s tough and tender love. At some point, however, it is no longer needed for daily psychological security and can be stashed away or tossed aside, a treasured memento or a forgotten crutch.
Clark’s teddies include the latter, the used “bear castaways” that have found their way somehow into Reykjavík’s charity shops. The distinctive wax coating she gives them is intended as a palpable reflection of the cuddles and/or abuse they once endured, a second skin comprised of the emotions they absorbed from their child custodians mixed with their own subjective reflections. Their experiences thus exposed, some of the bears are then piled up into cairns that guide the way through a surreal landscape of the collective childhood unconscious. Others have been torn apart, resewn, flattened, tied up; and some are no more now than their fluffy stuffing, ghosts hovering above their wax-encrusted and mutilated brethren. Textual elements incorporated into the installation are testimony to the bears’ perspectives on their wide range of human owners. Presiding over this scene that is at once sentimental and grotesque is the figure of the Mother Bear, an animal that draws together Norse mythology with the artist’s own symbolic visions. With one paw in the air, and with maps both terrestrial and celestial tattooed on her limbs, she is poised to lead the viewer on a journey of sorts. She is the “guiding beast,” as Clark sees her, on our individualized pilgrimages toward empathy, understanding, the past, the self. Golden teats protrude from her underbelly covered with hundreds of dripping wax papillae; she is life-sustaining and vulnerable, as mothers tend to be.
It seems fitting that the bear would be cast into the teddy’s role as the original not-me, the ultimate transitional animal. Whether black or brown, polar or panda, its charisma is undeniable, its power evident. Like a human, it can walk upright; like a human, its behaviors and moods can appear unpredictable. But it is wary of humans, and so we humans have learned to be wary of it. It postures to assert its dominance, and over time we have postured back, be it through bear worship or bear baiting. And now we ask the bear—or at least its plush effigy—to help us define ourselves by way of what we are not. Task complete, we can toss the creature aside and move on to our fully independent adult lives, lives that often take great pains to deny any psychological dependence upon animals.
The “truths” that Clark’s glazed teddies reveal are not essential ones; they are co-created at the meeting of bear and human. In inviting us into her fantastical realm where the teddy bear’s perspective reigns supreme, the artist also opens the door for us to consider the perspectives of other bears. That black bear, for instance, in the Mississippi swamp, or that brown bear ransacking a garbage can, or that sun bear in a zoo enclosure, or that polar bear on ever-thinning Arctic ice. We humans co-create meanings with those bears, too, directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally. Clark’s poignant installation demonstrates a certain indebtedness we will always have to our teddy bears, but the task is ours to remember our indebtedness and obligation to those bears.
Shauna Laurel Jones
Art Historian, Curator
Contributing text from publication: "bears; truths..."
The Secret Life of Bears
Teddy bears live a strange life. For a few years they enjoy a charmed existence, loved, trusted, cuddled, worried over, dressed up and taken everywhere. Their relationship to the child whose life they share is closer than any relationship we can hope for as adults, a near symbiosis where every secret and every emotion is shared. They take pride of place in the nursery and are central actors in every game and every fantasy, transforming themselves into storybook characters or fabulous fairy tale creatures on a whim. They survey a world of toys and games, sharing in every moment of the child’s life, the joys and sorrows, the triumphs and defeats. They are all at once king of the make-belief castle and trusted confidant, truest friend and constant companion.
Then one day, suddenly, it all ends. The magic has been used up and the child simply leaves its best friend behind. Some hang on for a while, gathering dust on a high shelf, but sooner or later the bear is thrown out and forgotten. Most probably go into the garbage to be disposed of with the remains of last night’s meal and the packaging from new, more adult toys. A few, perhaps for lingering sentimental reasons, get sent to the charity shop where they are thrown into bins with hundreds of other bears to languish in collective misery with only the memory of the magical past to sustain them. This is where Kathy Clark comes to the rescue. Over a period of almost two years she collected the bears that came into the shop, carefully sorting them and planning a new, no less magical world for them to inhabit.
Clark’s installation fills a whole exhibition hall and features hundreds of teddy bears. The arrangement allows the viewer to move through a series of sections guided by human-sized construction made of bears, like the cairns that used to guide travelers along remote highland roads. All the teddy bears in the exhibition are covered in wax which gives them a slightly strange but not unappealing look. It is as though their history and all the secrets they keep have been manifested on the outside as a protective cover and an emblem of their new role, not as cuddly toys but as rulers of their own realm. The bears are clustered together in tight companionship and this is very much their own world, their own fairy tale mirror of the domestic world they once inhabited. The centerpiece is a magnificent fireplace, the hearth of home, with a large bear on top – this one a more or less realistically rendered sculpture – and a large, ornate tree growing up from it to the ceiling. Another large, realistic bear stands before the hearth, gazing into it. On this bear’s flanks there are maps, including a map of the night sky, symbolizing the many worlds that bears inhabit as well as the many fantasy journeys of the nursery. Contributing to the domestic feel there is also a bear family portrait, several teddy bears of various sizes and colors, mounted in a large and ornate gold frame. The entire installation is bathed in a soft, glowing light and many parts are lit indirectly from behind giving the room a warm but slightly mysterious atmosphere.
Despite the air of domesticity, there is a more sinister side to this world of bears. In one section, entered through a large filigree gate, we find bears lying on the floor with all their stuffing taken out, mere husks, sad and forlorn. On shelves along the wall we also see misshaped bears, perhaps crushed and twisted by angry children, or perhaps by the weight of secrets and disappointments. Like the nursery, the world of bears includes both life and death, joyful play and deep misery, ecstasy and horror.
The bear is a potent symbol and it is difficult to imagine why it became the favored choice for a cuddly companion for children. Bears are in real life large and dangerous animals; from a rational point of view we should encourage our children to fear and avoid them, not to hug them and take them with them to bed. Part of the reason must be that bears are in some ways a mirror image of humans, even to the point of being able to mirror our upright posture. The Sami peoples of Northern Scandinavia called the bear “forest-father” and considered it a god so that very strict magical rules had to be observed when hunting and eating a bear. For many cultures the bear serves as a totem or spirit guide and shamans know that bears can move in all the worlds, the spirit worlds and well as our own. The presence of such a creature, even in effigy, in our nurseries is both disturbing and reassuring. The bear is the child’s guide and companion on magical journeys of fantasy, opening up new worlds far beyond the confines of the home, worlds that offer adventure and games, but also hold dangers and dark corners full of danger and fear.
The knowledge that every bear in Clark’s installation has in fact served some child in this capacity charges our experience of the world she has created. The bears are not merely manufactured toys but, in some sense, spiritual beings, imbued with all the experiences and feelings of childhood, keepers of secrets with knowledge of hidden worlds and horrors that we have buried deep down in our adult psyche. If these bears could talk the world would never be the same again and what Clark has created is more than just an installation, it is an environment, a whole world or even several worlds and every visitor brings to it a new one, his own world of nursery memories and secrets buried deep. It works on many levels. It is a factual documentation of our society, of how mass-manufactured objects gain significance as we take them into our lives, and then get discarded as we move on, leaving only fragmented memories. It is also an evocation of that magical time of life when everything is possible and the imagination can carry us into uncharted realms of fantasy; a time we have largely forgotten though what fragments of memory remain can still retain a faint glow of magic. Finally, it charts the intersection of all these many worlds: The “real” world, the mystical world, the world of fantasy and the world of the forest or the arctic ice where bears rule supreme, roaming vast distances and communing with nature and spirits.
Clark has given these forgotten, discarded bears a new purpose and a new world. She has also raised them to their true calling as proper bears, not mere playthings. Bears are powerful beasts – physically and spiritually – and we can never fully understand them or inhabit their world; if we transgress we risk a gruesome death for bears live their own lives, no matter how much we try to domesticate their image in our stories, nursery tales or films. In a sense, we can say that with her installation Clark has returned these bears to the wild.
Jón Proppé
Art Critic, Curator, Philosopher
Contributing text for Paintings.
The Perils We Pass
Long-lasting. Non-irritating. Instant. Acts fast.
The list continues, a litany of words and phrases found on product packaging or in advertisements, words intended to reassure the consumer of quality and value. While some are quick to suspicion in the face of seemingly unsubstantiated claims, we might also ask if the truth of the matter lies in the worth of an object or in the effectiveness of its persuasion. Kathy Clark chooses the second path, where an absence of skepticism does not mean naiveté but rather the artist’s refusal to succumb to cynicism. Accuracy is also in the eye of the beholder, she suggests through her painting Truths to be found everywhere; though the marketing truisms one after another become humorously empty words when placed in succession, they still tempt us to believe. And perhaps there is nothing wrong with being comforted.
This universal human desire for comfort is a recurring subject in Kathy’s art, whether explicitly or implicitly. In her work—assemblages of images, snippets of found texts, and objets trouvées that boldly protrude from canvas or panel—Kathy explores memory, pleasure and pain, humor and sadness, and self-definition as if through wide-eyed innocence of a child still forming a concept of reality. Perhaps best illustrating these themes is a painting which reads, “It’s difficult to confront / I’ve been bitten before,” where a frightened boy recoils from a colorful and cheerful dog mosaic of found objects. In this as in other works, Kathy employs the simple, straightforward pictorial language of mid-twentieth-century Dick-and-Jane schoolbooks in her contour line drawings of young children, conjuring the stereotypical spirit of post-WWII era white suburban America with its “wholesome” dreams and values. These children interact with other elements on, or emerging from, the picture plane, not least of which the words written chalkboard-style in white on black. Added to nearly every work are everyday objects, things Kathy finds during her walks through the dog park or washed up on the shore, worn and weathered in a way that reveals their past lives in the lives of their former owners. Such a nostalgic style is indeed “long-lasting” and “acts fast” upon our collective subconscious: these works are quickly readable and instantly trigger personal memories and the emotions we associate with them. Kathy’s art is not didactic. To whatever extent it speaks to her own experience, it equally seeks to relate to ours.
The three-dimensionality to her work, however—both in the large found objects like rubber boots and boxing gloves as well as in the solidity of the unframed panel with their unpainted borders—makes it, to a certain degree, confrontational. We are not encouraged to remain in an internal state of self-reflection, but are drawn back into the material world, then may return again. It is the tension between existential contemplation and the raw physicality of familiar objects that is compelling in Kathy’s art.
And perhaps it is no coincidence that certain formal aspects bespeak the earlier half of the twentieth century, beyond the Dick-and-Jane style figures. Kathy’s chalkboard writing recalls that of Magritte’s pipe series, and both the text style and the found objects resemble most strikingly André Breton’s Poèmes-objets, of which Breton hopes “that the reader-spectator may receive quite a novel sensation, one that is exceptionally disturbing and complex, as a result of the play of words with these [found objects], nameable or not.” Breton’s 1941 assemblage Poème-objet also bears another similarity to Kathy’s paintings: the division of the picture plane into darker and lighter sections. In Kathy’s work, the dark/light duality is a Jungian yin and yang, internal and external, not with a blurred boundary but with a firm horizon separating the two and reinforcing the tension between the material and non-material realms.
Existentialist philosophy and literature concurrent to the Surrealist movement of which Breton and Magritte were a part asserts that men and women define their own reality in the face of absurdity, that they are accountable for their actions but also for their values. So too does Kathy suggest that we have a choice of how to see and how to experience. Her “chalkboards” reveal figures and words painted and painted over, as if she took an eraser to chalk drawings but left an afterimage showing a change of mind. She says this explicitly in her work Choose to have meaning, in which figures playfully jump and somersault across the panel on which a teapot pours a semi-circular stripe around the words and a brick wall in progress. Similarly, another painting bears the words and the title Placing value.
Other works showing a preoccupation with the sea, direction and location, and travel reflect Kathy’s move to Iceland. An Arctic tern wings over a chewed-up rubber boot and the words “the winged one’s advance / tread lightly”; literally underfoot is a drawing of broken eggshells. Though this work has a specific personal meaning for Kathy, it also makes an environmental statement specific to Iceland and its fauna.
In notes to herself about her artwork, Kathy writes, “It can trigger something; can it be profound, or just bothersome?…Fear stops, wait for the eternal.” Nudging us gently to confront repressed memories, to choose the meanings we attribute to them, Kathy coaxes us to come into contact again with that time in which “we were once perfect and pure.” From his poem “North-west Passage,” Kathy quotes Robert Louis Stevenson in one of her paintings:
There, safe arrived, we turn about
To keep the coming shadows out,
And close the happy door at last
On all the perils that we past.
Whether the shadows in our past are confrontable or too dark to bear, Kathy Clark seeks to guide us back to comfort, at last.
In the world of Kathy Clark’s art, we are stripped of cynicism and skepticism and find, at the deepest core, that we are all truly ingenuous. Kathy’s work speaks candidly to this simplicity of being and with it the basic human longing to be comforted. Through assemblages of images, snippets of found texts, and objets trouvées that boldly protrude from canvas or panel, she explores memory, pleasure and pain, humor and sadness, and self-definition as if through wide-eyed innocence of a child still forming a concept of reality.
Kathy employs the pictorial language of Dick-and-Jane schoolbooks in contour line drawings of young children who interact with other elements on, or emerging from, the picture plane, not least of which the words written chalkboard-style in white on black. Added to nearly every work are everyday objects, things Kathy finds during her walks through the dog park or washed up on the shore, worn and weathered in a way that reveals their past lives. Her nostalgic style is quickly readable, triggering personal memories and the emotions we associate with them. Kathy’s art is not didactic. To whatever extent it speaks to her own experience, it equally seeks to relate to ours.
The three-dimensionality to her work, however—both in the large found objects like rubber boots and boxing gloves as well as in the solidity of the unframed panel with their unpainted borders—makes it, to a certain degree, confrontational. We are not encouraged to remain in an internal state of self-reflection, but are drawn back into the material world, then may return again. It is the tension between existential contemplation and the raw physicality of familiar objects that is compelling in Kathy’s art.
Certain works, such as Choose to have meaning and Placing value, suggest that we have an existential choice of how to see and how to experience. Her “chalkboards” reveal figures and words painted and painted over, as if she took an eraser to chalk drawings but left an afterimage showing a change of mind. Others, such as The winged one’s advance / tread lightly show a preoccupation with the sea, direction and location, and travel, reflecting Kathy’s move to Iceland.
In notes to herself about her artwork, Kathy writes, “It can trigger something; can it be profound, or just bothersome?…Fear stops, wait for the eternal.” Nudging us gently to confront repressed memories, to choose the meanings we attribute to them, Kathy coaxes us to come into contact again with that time in which “we were once perfect and pure.” Whether the shadows in our past are confrontable or too dark to bear, Kathy Clark seeks to guide us back to comfort, at last.
Shauna Laurel Jones is an independent art historian and writer living in Reykjavík.