Artistic Statement
My artistic process/practice has followed a trajectory that has brought many of my past strategies as an artist into question. I have been making theater and performance for almost 40 years. In the earlier part of my career, I worked as a collaborative actor with seminal directors and companies in the New York avant grade of the 80's and 90's. Writing has been mainly for solo performances and for the theater as plays for youth here in Yellow Springs. I live in a small town in Ohio and my work took on a community -based focus. Activism and social justice became more central, as well as the desire to engage communities in conversations about history, identity and stewardship. I also explored the interplay of psychology and performance, working from archetypal, non-rational origins for my ideas in performance. For the past ten years, I have trained in clinical counseling and Jungian psychotherapy and have worked as a clinician, while continuing to teach, write and create solo performance. My writing gravitates towards memoir and fictionalized autobiography, and I have wandered into questions about the nature of performing, of disclosing, re-enacting, and researching. I like the interplay between the individual and the landscape, between the psyche and its location in the world but the questions are large and sometimes unwieldy. I explore large themes like the notion of HOME and what it means, collectively and personally. In the past, I have looked at and created works about the SPIRIT that moves ACTIVISM in a study of Joan of Arc; the COLONIZATION of Africa as it relates to RACE and the deep hegemonic impulse to explore and CONQUER, WATER as a material resource and psychic symbol of the LIMINAL, WOMEN in fairytales and the VIOLENCE done to them. I follow a beckoning within myself to hang out for a couple of years in a space where I work associatively, knitting together my own interests and impulses with the broader theme. Most recently, I am drawn again to early roots, fascinated by the inner workings of the human being and the margins of what we consider normalcy. I guess if I had to step back and look at the meta-theme of what I write about it would have to be the personal experience of feeling marginal and discarded, and how that has provided me with a place to view the world from an edge that also facilitates insights. Resiliency, power and control, the odd, social forces and dynamics that shape our experience, the shadow, the blindspot , the quest…
Carl Jung’s ideas about archetypal imagination and the psyche have infused much of my writing. Early on, I turned to him for inspiration and strategies to move through the artistic landscape I was traversing. For the past ten years or so, I have focused on writing not as a vehicle for performance, but as a more internal and crafted space to be read from the page by the reader. During this time, I also became a psychotherapist and began working, first in community mental health and then in private practice. My most recent work delves into the experience I had when working with people with severe mental illness, people on the margins of what we consider normal or sane. I also talk reflect on my own experience as one trying to help, but also earning my livelihood as a helper. How am I implicated? In another, almost parallel work I am experimenting with a more playful and associative approach that works to invite a deeper, subconscious and intuitive process. This more recent work is very fresh and may only be a bridge to the next large theme that I have yet to inhabit.
Carl Jung’s ideas about archetypal imagination and the psyche have infused much of my writing. Early on, I turned to him for inspiration and strategies to move through the artistic landscape I was traversing. For the past ten years or so, I have focused on writing not as a vehicle for performance, but as a more internal and crafted space to be read from the page by the reader. During this time, I also became a psychotherapist and began working, first in community mental health and then in private practice. My most recent work delves into the experience I had when working with people with severe mental illness, people on the margins of what we consider normal or sane. I also talk reflect on my own experience as one trying to help, but also earning my livelihood as a helper. How am I implicated? In another, almost parallel work I am experimenting with a more playful and associative approach that works to invite a deeper, subconscious and intuitive process. This more recent work is very fresh and may only be a bridge to the next large theme that I have yet to inhabit.
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Louise Smith
Artistic Statement
My artistic process/practice has followed a trajectory that has brought many of my past strategies as an artist into question. I have been making theater and performance for almost 40 years. In the earlier part of my career, I worked as a collaborative actor with seminal directors and companies in the New York avant grade of the 80's and 90's. Writing has been mainly for solo performances and for the theater as plays for youth here in Yellow Springs. I live in a small town in Ohio and my work took on a community -based focus. Activism and social justice became more central, as well as the desire to engage communities in conversations about history, identity and stewardship. I also explored the interplay of psychology and performance, working from archetypal, non-rational origins for my ideas in performance. For the past ten years, I have trained in clinical counseling and Jungian psychotherapy and have worked as a clinician, while continuing to teach, write and create solo performance. My writing gravitates towards memoir and fictionalized autobiography, and I have wandered into questions about the nature of performing, of disclosing, re-enacting, and researching. I like the interplay between the individual and the landscape, between the psyche and its location in the world but the questions are large and sometimes unwieldy. I explore large themes like the notion of HOME and what it means, collectively and personally. In the past, I have looked at and created works about the SPIRIT that moves ACTIVISM in a study of Joan of Arc; the COLONIZATION of Africa as it relates to RACE and the deep hegemonic impulse to explore and CONQUER, WATER as a material resource and psychic symbol of the LIMINAL, WOMEN in fairytales and the VIOLENCE done to them. I follow a beckoning within myself to hang out for a couple of years in a space where I work associatively, knitting together my own interests and impulses with the broader theme. Most recently, I am drawn again to early roots, fascinated by the inner workings of the human being and the margins of what we consider normalcy. I guess if I had to step back and look at the meta-theme of what I write about it would have to be the personal experience of feeling marginal and discarded, and how that has provided me with a place to view the world from an edge that also facilitates insights. Resiliency, power and control, the odd, social forces and dynamics that shape our experience, the shadow, the blindspot , the quest…
Carl Jung’s ideas about archetypal imagination and the psyche have infused much of my writing. Early on, I turned to him for inspiration and strategies to move through the artistic landscape I was traversing. For the past ten years or so, I have focused on writing not as a vehicle for performance, but as a more internal and crafted space to be read from the page by the reader. During this time, I also became a psychotherapist and began working, first in community mental health and then in private practice. My most recent work delves into the experience I had when working with people with severe mental illness, people on the margins of what we consider normal or sane. I also talk reflect on my own experience as one trying to help, but also earning my livelihood as a helper. How am I implicated? In another, almost parallel work I am experimenting with a more playful and associative approach that works to invite a deeper, subconscious and intuitive process. This more recent work is very fresh and may only be a bridge to the next large theme that I have yet to inhabit.
Carl Jung’s ideas about archetypal imagination and the psyche have infused much of my writing. Early on, I turned to him for inspiration and strategies to move through the artistic landscape I was traversing. For the past ten years or so, I have focused on writing not as a vehicle for performance, but as a more internal and crafted space to be read from the page by the reader. During this time, I also became a psychotherapist and began working, first in community mental health and then in private practice. My most recent work delves into the experience I had when working with people with severe mental illness, people on the margins of what we consider normal or sane. I also talk reflect on my own experience as one trying to help, but also earning my livelihood as a helper. How am I implicated? In another, almost parallel work I am experimenting with a more playful and associative approach that works to invite a deeper, subconscious and intuitive process. This more recent work is very fresh and may only be a bridge to the next large theme that I have yet to inhabit.