Mind field: a hair strand contemplates the order IV

The Mind Field series (1988 - 2007) was one of the last bodies of work Vivian Lynn produced in her lifetime, serving as a culmination of her formal and material experimentation over a six-decade-long practice. In Mind field: a hair strand contemplates the order IV, painted Rorschach ink blot cut-outs are floated over aluminium. The aluminium backing is sealed with a wrinkled, translucent gampi paper soaked in pigmented glue, treated to resemble a metallic yet bloodied skin. At once female genitalia and muscled torsos, butterflies and brains, Vivian Lynn’s floating signs reflect her ongoing interest in exploration of female identity and pushing beyond the mind-body binary to conceive of more mutable, complex selfhoods.

“These paintings work with themes of projection, identity, cultural memory and mutability through the free forms of Rorschach ink blots. These works are not about something, they are arrived at from my ground of experience which has long eschewed the notion of a stable, enduring inner self and identity - the unified individual - in favour of a corporeal, visceral, neural, erotic mind self in the world, where identity emerges, ebbs, flows and mutates from behaviour in the lived space we inhabit.” – Vivian Lynn

Vivian Lynn interviewed by Peter Vangioni, Art School 125, October 2007

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