Fine Art practice | turning-tree-arts

Ivan Daggett - fine artist

My practice as a fine artist is in creating images with materials, mostly sculptural, with an attraction towards expressing an archetypal way of seeing the world. Myth has been an important reference throughout my work, my understanding being that they contain layers and patterns of meaning called archai which create a fabric that underlies the culture of societies throughout the world, as much now as in the earliest recordings of history.

Developing such a method of working has taken me to participating in Wilderness Psychology courses in the UK and USA, working in private tuition with the late Archetypal Psychologist, Poet and Writer Noel Cobb, post graduate studies in Transpersonal Arts and Practice with Dr Marie Angelo at the University of Chichester and my own private journey in Jungian Psychology.

As a tutor I have worked in Further Education across a wide 16 - 80 age group in an A Level and Diploma in Art and Design and Adult Education environment.

In recent years I have developed private classes, workshops and projects in my studio which I represent under the umbrella name of 'Turning Tree Arts'.

Sculpture: Orphic Orator (lava cast) - hollow cast plaster with graphite from silcone rubber mold from clay orignal, 2010.

Video: Eurydician Decent, 2010.

The theme of Eurydice descending to a below place characterises the video sequence. The actress Dulcie Wagstaff is filmed in a car park stairway in Harlow Essex in January 2010.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice originates from early Greek culture. Orpheus’s love Eurydice is bitten by a serpent and dies; in his grief he pleads to the gods of the underworld for her life. Orpheus wish is granted on the condition that whilst leaving the underworld he must not look back else she would remain there forever. On the verge of leaving he forgets.

Descent into an underworld is a common motif in myth, and is undertaken for a variety of reasons.

"Sometimes events occur that naturally captivate our attention, arresting us mid-stream in our daily lives and returning to our thoughts with increasing intensity. While there is no obvious initial explanation for why these events seem to grab us, if we turn our awareness to them, create a container in which they can unfold, and allow them to speak to us through image and emotion, they can provide powerful messages about our personal lives, our psyches, and our relationship with the culture and cosmos around us.

C.G. Jung believed these captivating events and images are manifestations of the unconscious, which are imbued with numinosity. Jung believed in the idea of a collective unconscious, which is vast and inexhaustible; limitless, unknowable, and indefinable. It is made up of what Jung called archetypes, autonomous patterns or instincts that organize the contents of the unconscious and connect it, at its deepest levels, to nature."

Please click on the pdf symbol for information from two exhibitions in 2010 and 2013.