Research Trip- Audrey Kawasaki

In this research trip, I wanted to visit an exhibition that I have a personal interest in and that I feel could kick-start my project for new ideas and inspiration. 

‘Ghost Stories’ connects with Kawasaki’s sense of spirituality, and that which is bizarre, mysterious, and weird which has a peculiar allure to her. The artist has always had a fascination with stories of ghosts, the paranormal, and the macabre, which is now hauntingly expressed through this beautiful new body of work.

Kawasaki's seductive, and ethereal female subjects are painted with delicate beauty and provocative, direct eye contact. Their graceful gestures and ghost-like features carry mysterious expressions of melancholy and longing. “My painted women are like ghosts. They are fleeting visions only captured in my work, fuelled more by impulse and instinct when it comes to the subject matter. ‘She’ tells me to draw her like this, and then I go along with her request, I show up at the studio to work and make progress until she tells me, “Ok. We are done here”. I am her obedient servant. I give her my time and effort until it pleases her. There are certain moments in the drawing and painting process when I feel extra excited and pleased, as if she sings and is finally content with my efforts. She shouts “Yes! Yes! Yes!”. I guess in a way I work for her praise and approval. This is how I prefer to make sense of it all. To separate myself from her, and to romanticise this strange relationship with my women.” - Audrey Kawasaki, 2023

https://privateviews.artlogic.net/2/df663eb9c7465771a8a142/ 

For example, in this speed drawing I understand from his thumbnail sketches the composition and feel of the character, and after speed painting and drastically changing the face, I understand this was a thoughtful decision by the company's feedback of by the artists because something wasn't working for the character.

In terms of colour, he uses bright and vibrant paint colours to contrast with the cooler tones of the rest of the scene, including the character's skin tones. He uses sharp highlights which match the form of the object to create contrast and bring about reflection through the paint light source onto the objects and the character itself.

I want to take this idea into my work, creating art inspired by a similar style but also using a sequence of images that reflect a narrative or not at all. I want to see how the audience perceives this. Why did they think/ react this way and what is the significance of words and other visual cues to help piece together a narrative?

Dreams don't always seem to make sense to us but many suspect that they can reveal a lot about our inner consciousness and deeper thoughts arising to the surface that make us aware of things that we truly feel.

This concept is relevant to my project as it helps me to identify the significance of grief and death. Death is final and being with a partner for so long we think they are like our other half. But how well can we truly know another person? We can't read minds, intentions or feelings. They can be hidden and masked, almost like a guessing game. This makes life fun and mysterious but scary as we are always vulnerable and going into the unknown. We can only have trust.

Premature death heightens this concept, we have not yet experienced the full breadth of life, nor has the world fully gotten to know us. I want to bring this idea into my project, understanding that grief is our pain, our emotional response to our own experience and perspective of that person. The interactions and relationships we had with them, it is all unique. If they unmasked would our love stop or fade?

• trauma stored in the body from traumatic events such as body shutting down, anger and deflection

• they have a hard time meaning connecting with anything happening in the present including enjoying what is around them and loving their family

• shadow of their former self and passive

• can also go from 0-100% blowing up their emotions

• suffer from 'physioneurosis' affecting mental and physical attributes

• trauma comes back in terms of images and behaviours- PTSD

• Trauma is extremely common

• an event becomes traumatic when there is nothing you can do to stave off the unimaginable- the body goes into fight/flight

• body learns this and continues to react in this flight/flight response through triggers

• our reactions are routed into experience as we don't feel safe

• we heal through self-compassion and self-soothing, and acknowledging what we have in the first place is the first step

How this is relevant to my project:

From this, I can understand that grieving is a common traumatic event that happens to everyone. This can form many types of reactions, emotional and physical and there is no set time we heal from this. It is a huge shift in our lives that everyone must deal with and may always feel pain from.

In my project, I would like to explore this in terms of my character's poses, reactions, compositions and colours. It's important to note that not all trauma or mental health conditions are visible. However, I think it would be interesting to explore the visible side of this and the contrast in trauma to healing.

I have picked Spiderverse because of its excellent character design, sound track and narrative but in particular its art. From the cinematic shots to the colour palettes, each element is thought out to enhance the narrative and the audience's emotional engagement with both the story and the characters.

The Blue Eyed Samurai I have also chosen for its unique style and beautiful cinematic shots.

• No scientist is perfectly sure how the brain physically sorts and stores all the information — and all the types of information — that gets encoded into memories.

• In psychology, memory is a huge topic. You might use working memory for holding a few digits in your head while you go to unlock a keypad; episodic memory to recall a school trip to the state fair from when you were 10; sensory memory to conjure up the smells of the funnel cakes there. You can remember historical facts like when the state fair was founded; you can remember the directions for how to get to the fairgrounds.

• Previous research shows humans are good at this sort of recognition game. We’re capable of recognizing tens of thousands of images we’ve seen before. But we’re not perfect at it. Some images stick vividly in our minds, while others may fade away even when we actively try to remember them.

• Some faces are more memorable than others, some scenes are more memorable than others, and even some random noise images — scrambled, unrecognizable fields of light and colour — are more memorable than others.

• It’s clear from memory research that certain life events are more likely to be remembered than others. “You remember getting married, you remember the college graduation, you remember these kinds of events that we’ve deemed to be important milestones,” says Lisa Fazio, a memory researcher at Vanderbilt University.

When our brain’s neurons communicate and meet using neurotransmitters, synapses are formed. Furthermore, when two neurons repeatedly meet the communication process improves and creates what is called Long Term Potentiation, which is considered to be a major factor in how memories are stored long term.

Fading memories – age

But what happens to certain short and long term memories causing them to fade or get lost? Age is one culprit. Why? Because as we get older our synapses begin to falter and weaken, affecting the ease in which we can retrieve memories.

But what’s behind this aging deterioration? Well, research has shown to credit a few theories. As we age, over time our brains will shrink. As a result, the hippocampus, you remember that important long term memory storage in your brain, loses up to 5% of its neurons every decade. Do the math, and by the time you’re 80 years old your hippocampus has sustained a 20% loss.

Why memories fade

Chronic stress

Chronic stress is another leading factor to our fading memories. Constant overloading of responsibility and stress puts our bodies in hyper alert. Well-balanced stress chemicals in the brain help mobilize energy and increase alertness, both very good things. Yet, chronic stress can overloaded these chemicals and cause them to flood our brain resulting in a loss of brain cells and an inability to form new ones.

Depression

Did you know people who suffer from depression are nearly 40% more likely to develop memory issues? Low levels of serotonin can make depressed individuals less attentive to new information or the recollection of stored information. Vice versily, dwelling on depressive past events can make a person less likely to store short term memories due to lack of paying attention to the present.

Isolation

Isolation is another memory thief. As a form of depression, isolation doesn’t give our brain the mental workout that healthy social interaction does. Just like exercising your muscles to keep your body strong and healthy, your brain too needs a good workout regimen. You know what they say, “use it or lose it.” The same principle applies to our brains and memories.

If you dream about a deceased loved one visiting you in a dream, its meaning depends on your current state of mind. Your dreams are comprised of your inner thoughts and emotions, so you may need to find a way to release them.

This type of dream is also known as a visitation dream. They are usually vivid and feel so real that you may consider the dream an authentic experience when you wake up. This usually results in a shift in your grieving process.

The first thing you should do when dreaming about a deceased relative is to look at how they communicate with you. A peaceful approach could mean that they are trying to bring you a sense of comfort or peace after their passing. Looking sad could mean that they are disappointed in something you’re doing.

Many things can cause you to dream about deceased people. Here are some of the most common:

Still grieving

If your brain is still trying to process someone passing away, it’s not uncommon to see them in dreams. These dreams can also be amplified by how much you think of them.

An ending of something

In many cultures, death symbolizes the ending of something. If you see a deceased loved one in a dream, you may struggle with ending a relationship, situation, or opportunity. This thing may hold significance to the person who passed away.

Guidance

Another common reason is that you may need their help on a matter. If this person served as a beacon of advice or understanding for you, it’s normal to see them in dreams when you need to make an important decision. You may be internally missing the advice or guidance they used to give you.

Peace

Seeing deceased loved ones in dreams is even more common when they have passed away unexpectedly. If they visit you in a dream with a peaceful approach, you can take this as a sign that their soul is at peace. This type of dream may give you closure.

Studies have revealed diverse types of dream content, but some typical characteristics of dreaming include:

• It has a first-person perspective.

• It is involuntary.

• The content may be illogical or even incoherent.

• The content includes other people who interact with the dreamer and one another.

• It provokes strong emotions.

• Elements of waking life are incorporated into content.

Although these features are not universal, they are found at least to some extent in most normal dreams.

Debate continues among sleep experts why we dream including:

• Building memory: Dreaming has been associated with consolidation of memory, which suggests that dreaming may serve an important cognitive function of strengthening memory and informational recall.

• Processing emotion: The ability to engage with and rehearse feelings in different imagined contexts may be part of the brain’s method for managing emotions.

• Mental housekeeping: Periods of dreaming could be the brain’s way of “straightening up,” clearing away partial, erroneous, or unnecessary information.

• Instant replay: Dream content may be a form of distorted instant replay in which recent events are reviewed and analyzed.

• Incidental brain activity: This view holds that dreaming is just a by-product of sleep that has no essential purpose or meaning.

It's impossible to conclusively prove any theory for why we dream.

Grief is that emotional state that just knocks you off your feet and comes over you like a wave. Grieving necessarily has a time component to it. Grieving is what happens as we adapt to the fact that our loved one is gone, that we're carrying the absence of them with us. And the reason that this distinction makes sense is, grief is a natural response to loss — so we'll feel grief forever. A woman who lost her mother as a young person is going to experience that grief on her wedding day because it's a new moment where she's having a response to loss.

Grief is like someone turned up the volume dial all of a sudden. The emotion that I think often interferes with our relationships and friendships when we're grieving is anger, because the anger feels so intense.

But "grieving" means that our relationship to that grief changes over time. So the first time, maybe even the first 100 times, you're knocked off your feet with grief, it feels terrible and awful and unfamiliar. But maybe the 101st time, you think to yourself, "I hate this, I don't want this to be true. But I do recognize it, and I do know that I will get through the wave."

On the emotions involved in grieving

The range of emotions that someone experiences when they're grieving is as long a list as the range of emotions we have in any relationship. Commonly there's panic, there's anxiety, there's sadness, there's yearning. But what we sometimes forget is that there's also difficulty concentrating and confusion about what happens next.

On what is happening in our brains

We have neuroimaging studies basically of grief, of the momentary reaction where you have that emotional yearning experience. There are less than a handful of studies looking at more than one moment in the same person across time — so looking at their grieving trajectory. What we know right now in these early days of the neurobiology of grief is really coming from snapshots.

On prolonged grief

When you're knocked over by that wave of grief, you want to know, "When will this end?" From a research perspective, there is a very small proportion of people who might have what we now call prolonged grief disorder, something we start looking for after six months or a year [after a death or loss]. ... And what we are seeing, [in such cases], is that this person has not been able to function day to day the way that they wish that they could. They're not getting out the door to work or getting dinner on the table for their kids or they're not able to, say, listen to music because it's just too upsetting. So these types of concerns ... suggest it would be helpful to intervene and get them back on the healing trajectory where they will still feel grief, but they will adapt to it differently.

In Summary

Our brains make connections with different objects, known as object associations, based on how we feel about them and the experiences we have had with them. This is largely a good thing, as it means our brains can be quick to identify when something is of use to us. As we continue to grow in our lives and have new experiences, we can develop new feelings about familiar objects. So don’t worry! Your brain is made to evolve and you can change your thoughts around different things!

Rose-tinted glasses

Nostalgia is typically considered a contradictory emotional experience. Even with happy memories, nostalgia can be both sweet and sour. While you feel comfort and warmth about the memory itself, you may also feel sadness because that experience is gone.

“The memories in nostalgia are not always good. Sometimes they are bittersweet or even sad,” Yang explained. “But even the bad memories that come to mind seem to be more positive because we see them through a rose-tinted filter.” We aren’t just longing for our past, we are remembering a romanticized version of our past. 

According to Batcho, there’s a reason our memories become fonder over time, why the negative bits tend to fade away faster. Take parenthood, for example. 

“Remembering things as better than they were serves an evolutionary purpose. If people were to remember things faithfully to the original, most women would never want to have more than one child,” Batcho said laughing. “It’s a function of species survival that we can gloss over the bad portions of the past.”  

So, is there such a thing as too much nostalgia? Possibly. 

As a temporary escape, nostalgia provides a much-needed respite that can sustain us during difficult times. It can become negative if you get stuck ruminating on the past. 

But in general, nostalgia is a healthy, even vital component of the human experience. At its core, nostalgia helps guide us back to our authentic selves, reminding us of who we were always meant to be. 

Link to video: https://vimeo.com/913441184