DISSOCIATIVE EPISODE

My friend, Nancy, brought me a present one day and said, “Here. I thought you could do something with this.” In the bag, was a large dilapidated doll body and the head that had been torn off of it. The wheels started to turn. By the time I got home, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to play with the idea of detachment of the head and the body. Through the physical separation of the two pieces, I should be able to speak to the psychological separation of our intellect from our actions. He was out of his head. She’s out of her mind. He has a good head on his shoulders. What were you thinking? You’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached. Don’t we all have experiences where we make a decision and forge ahead with a plan, regardless of the facts we know to be true. The facts don’t apply … because we don’t want them to apply.

First, I needed to physically isolate the head-intellect from the body-heart. Boxes, boxes, boxes. I built tightly fitting boxes to hold the head and the body. I did not lose the implication of these boxes being coffins, but I am not going there right now. I lined the body box with surreal images. This background represented the external stimuli that constantly bombards our heart, our emotional selves. I did not use the same approach on the head box. My rationale was that such ideas would be dismissed due to our intellect. I wanted to connect the body with nature and natural symbols … a feather, a rock at its feet, an umbilical cord. I addressed the issue of the headless corpse with a bird’s nest and rocks. Bird-brained. Rocks for brains. The outside of the box was covered with dated license plates. This was to strengthen the idea of age and tradition and hanging on to what has been rather than the current factual interpretation. I covered the head box with copper sheets that had been scored with geometric patterns. I wanted the bright, clean colors and the patterns to further represent the intellect.

The two boxes were not attached. The smaller head box was positioned in any direction atop the body box. For me, this represented the disassociation of intellect from reality – the head from the body.