Weird: The strange, unusual and surreal

There’s a lot of weirdness that has shaped my life, ultimately influencing the creative work I produce: Dad constructing non-conventional furniture, Psychology Today and National Geographic magazines and last but not least the Surrealists.

I have written about my father before. My blog Luggage had a photo of him strapping a pile of furniture four feet high onto the roof of the blue Buick during our family vacation. This in and of itself was weird and almost could have been likened to a mobile assemblage artwork. Much of the furniture that he brought home from that trip was eventually transformed. Wood was stripped, revarnished or painted and chairs were caned with loving hands.

About ten years later, Dad (a Presbyterian minister) went above and beyond, and decided to dismantle a church organ (not from our church) with all its bells and whistles and reassemble it in a spare bedroom in our house. My guess is he had caught wind of the instrument in need of a home through his professional connections.

Now this activity could have been deemed a bit weird, it was certainly unusual – none of my friends had a church organ in their bedrooms but it was ‘normal’ in our household and I revel in that memory.

With the leftover wooden pipes, he made two coffee tables. One of them graced our lounge where the latest issues of Psychology Today and National Geographic were carefully placed for leisurely light reading. Both of these publications I would regularly peruse. I found Jung’s philosophy to be particularly interesting and the photographs that appeared on the pages of both magazines were serious eye candy.

The creation of the pipe organ tables showed me how to use objects in a way not originally intended. Add this to an interest in unusual old objects (thanks to my parents), the inspirational imagery from the magazines as highlighted above along with an introduction to Jungian theory focusing on the unconscious, made for my own unconscious gravitational pull towards the Surrealists when I was doing my undergraduate study in Art.

We have André Breton and his colleagues (i.e. Dalí, Duchamp, Man Ray) to thank for the Surrealist movement established in the early 20th century. The Surrealists are known for their juxtaposition of diverse imagery, influenced by the unconscious often from dreams manifesting in various imaginative creative outputs including: paintings, sculpture using the found object (objet trouvé), collage, film and of course poetry.

Sarane Alexandrian writes:

the surrealists set out…to create new demands on reality…to liberate the workings of the subconscious, disrupting conscious thought….creat[ing] a new form of sensibility….it set poetry at the centre of everything, and used art to make poetry into something which could be seen and touched…

Michel mentions that if one takes surrealist imagery/poetry at face value, that the creative works appear to be weird and random. He also puts forward how these types of artworks resist simple meanings and concrete interpretations. The Surrealists he says:

confronted viewers and readers with bizarre imagery that avoided no fixed cultural meaning or else subverted established meanings….One might argue many don’t accept that life doesn’t make sense…

Thus, it seems that the Surrealists’ audience back in the day and perhaps today as well, had issues with the works because of their weirdness and non-depiction of a known reality - a fear of the weird, Fear of the Surreal, as Michel’s blog post title is called. I got lost in further reading about the Surrealists for this article, definite food for thought, however I became distracted as I began to reflect on my own work, my own weirdness and creative development.

Untitled (Alarm Clock Case) 1983

In my first drawing class at university I was making juxtaposed images such as a cigarette metamorphosing into a pencil. Later in my third year I used a box full of alarm clock cases found at a local thrift store as foundations to create a series of 15 artworks (see example above). These were to be a pivotal series. I continue to use clocks today in my work.

Insect Hotel (Grandfather Clock Case)Manchester Museum 2020

My later assemblage works purposefully make connections between different elements, like visual poetry. They often tell non-linear stories focusing on place and identity. In the case of the Insect Hotel, created during my Artist in Residence at Manchester Museum in 2020, I also incorporated poetry into the work as well and created a collection of insect themed poems.

Insect Hotel Detail Manchester Museum 2020

Often with surrealist art and my own assemblages because the viewer can’t read the works with immediate recognition other than a main object/s (i.e. clock shape) they will not take time to explore and discover the many layers of meaning and connections within them – this also goes for some types of poetry. It’s taking time with a creative piece. There’s no wrong or right way to read something no matter how weird, although one might think there is. Everything is open for interpretation and each viewer brings their personal experience when engaging.

Enough rambling - to finish off, I thought I’d have a go at creating more weirdness, surrendering to the unconscious through automatic writing, one of the Surrealists’ methods of creating poetry. I found this not as enjoyable and more difficult than other Surrealists’ methods I have experimented with (collage and blackout poetry). It was an interesting exercise and quicker to do than the other types. I set a timer for two minutes, with the first two, and three minutes for the last. Here are the results:

1)
what moon bright star
giraffe feet clumsy
sink into soil a sandpit
a dark hole swallow
whole and grains like
timer oh the flowers arched
droop stems petals are
gone as dust flies into the
wind my eyes pop out roll
along the hill on a journey beyond
the horizon

2)
homeward bound dogs run past
the prairie dogs on grass by
trees alone she stands among
men who circle the feet with
dogs barking cars racing down the
long straight road to nowhere
somewhere another she lights a
fire to keep warm opening a tin
of beans

3)
onto the shore seaweed slime
open eyes diamonds shine
red or white at night and day
squint moon squint
can you see through black abyss
the owl fluffs its wings
brown speckled feathers
one is lost floating free
to land in moss and fungi
ants crawl spiders weave
squirrels climb the cat stalks
rodents hide

Thank you for reading, 

Kate J

Sources
Alexandrian, S. 1989. Surrealist Art. 2nd Edition. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd Cambridge Dictionary, 2024
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/weird Accessed 14 April
Language is a virus, 2024. Automatic Writing.
https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/automatic-writing.php 
Accessed 14 April
Michel, L., 2023. Fear of the Surreal.
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/fear-of-the-surreal Accessed 15 April 2024