The Shrinks
Meet the Shrinks (2023). They are made of papier-mâché from old journals and notes from my years of working as a social worker and therapist, acrylic paint, buttons from my maternal grand-mothers button box, string and wheat-paste.
These guys arrived a little unexpectedly. I had another plan for them entirely, but I couldn’t make it work, and at some point I just let go, and allowed for what ever to come out. I made them in time for my previous exhibition, I Make Stuff About Me, but they didn’t quite fit, so I’ve kept them in a little box for The Self Help Files.
I remember one of my friends remarking on some of my paintings that I made during the period 2019-2021 that they were dark. And I couldn’t see that in them myself. Maybe I thought I hid it better, or maybe it was a fish not seeing the water type of thing, I don’t know. I know the unlit corners of my mind well, and I have been let into similar spaces in others.
For years I worked with children who for different reasons no longer could live in their own home, because it was not safe. I have so many stories that I can’t tell. Or, I can, but just not the way I got to know them. I have to find other ways to communicate and express what I’ve seen, what I’ve felt; and I have to let what they have seen, and what they have felt, go through me.
Being a therapist and caregiver for children who didn’t ask for your help, is a complicated task, and type of work that very few people understand if they haven’t done it. And it is made almost impossible to do well within the political and economic framework available. The shallow understanding in society of something so basic as emotions, attachment theory, developmental psychology, trauma, just anything to do with mental health, is also not helping, to put it mildly. I am an outspoken anti-capitalist for the same reasons, because this system has a direct impact on the health of our children and their fundamental human rights. It is impossible to talk about child care, education, prevention of youth crime, and so on, without understanding how this society keeps on making the individual responsible for fixing problems that can only be amended collectively.
And this is particularly true for children. Children don’t choose their parents, where they are born is completely random, they have no impact on their financial situation, their access to education and knowledge is at the mercy of the adults, they don’t get to choose their religion, and the legal framework have since the beginning made a division between children’s rights and the governments duty, favoring the latter. Meaning, that legally, children didn’t have the right to help from the state in the instances where their own parents was unable to take care of them the way they needed and wanted, only that the state had a duty to provide services to that effect. And that distinction is why we haven’t yet seen huge lawsuits against the state in this country. That, and the fact that these children more often than not grow up to belong to a socio-economical group in society that don’t necessarily have any real access to the legal system.
I worked with children and their families for years, and all levels of state involved in regulating a child’s life. And in the end, I was just so tired of seeing kids doing everything to be accepted in a society that wouldn't, no matter how hard they tried. Because at some point, it’s the society that has to move. It’s the society that needs to change and go through all of these incredibly challenging processes of understanding who we are, how we got here, and what the consequences of our actions are.
We demand all of this and so much more of children who get a fucked up start in life, and then we blame them and shame them, when they aren’t able to fix the problems that we as a society is creating for them.
The injustice of this became too much for me in the end. The lack of basic human empathy, care, solidarity, and trust, was draining me into nothing. I had to walk away, even though I absolutely loved working with the kids. And it broke my heart to do it. I still feel guilty about it. About not doing more with the things I know, my experience, my knowledge. But I also try to remind myself that I am feeling the same as the kids are made to feel. I am made to feel like it is on me to repair a problem, when it can only be accomplished through a collective effort. And I am also still doing the work, just somewhere else.
Why else would I work with art in the way that I do, where my goal is to empower people to express themselves, and create change, to know that they have agency, and that this is not the only way we can live together. Sure, it’s “just” art, but it’s also challenging consumerism, and the idea of property and who has the rights to the surfaces. It’s challenging the understanding of the cultural field/art world, a.k.a the market, because people are using those terms as if they mean the same, and that is just not true. It’s saying that things have value outside the price you want to put on it. It’s saying, there’s room here, for you, and all the others, and we can co-exist, because we respect each other, we trust each other, we appreciate all the different ways we show up in this world. It’s transcending the narrow mindset of what beauty really means, and being ok with not understanding everything, because not everything is for you. It’s learning that you are entitled to nothing if it comes at the expense of another, knowing that no one is free until we are all free.
Having worked as a therapist for years, one of my biggest lessons and most important messages, is that it is more important that we make space for people to express themselves than how they do it. We have to learn to listen and see beyond the wrapping. And people will whataboutism this, and say that there needs to be some boundaries attached to it, and yeah, I just stated them in the previous paragraph. Learn how you think, how you operate, listen to yourself, observe yourself, reflect on yourself. Learn how to communicate, and understand that this means: learn how to listen. Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. And this is for the grown-ups only: fuck any and all systems based on shame and punishment, and get over yourself. You need to educate yourself on these matters. You need to seek out books and teachings about how we construct and define society, and how a system operates and what makes them effective, because - and this is important - the most successful systems are the ones that are able to support, sustain and reproduce themselves. And the current system we are living within, is not conducive with who we are and what we need as humans.
A human can not exist outside a collective. It does not mean that you have to be around other people all the time, but essentially speaking it means that you would not be here were it not for other people. And a central teaching in social pedagogy, which is my main field, is that humans can only become humans through human interaction.
You are made human by other humans.
And the opposite is also true, which is made clear these days in the most horrific way. Only inhumane people dehumanize other people.
My goal was, and still is, to help create an environment, and a place, where there is room for all of us. My working field have for years and years, probably my whole life when I think of it, been the areas of society where people are at its margins, or pushed beyond entirely. Because we all have the same rights to live, to feel like we belong, to be taken care of, to be respected, and to be treated with kindness and dignity.
I am human because you make me human. And you must make me human.