Flowers for Rapunzel

Herringer Kiss Gallery - Ends Nov 14, 2020

About Flowers for Rapunzel, by Fiona Ackerman, Oct 20202

Painting for me is literally an abstract puzzle, where I add and edit colour, change shapes, move things around, and try different combinations until the often frustrating problem feels solved. Or at least, at peace.  

But that’s just what I’m doing with my hands. 

Anyone who’s gotten lost in making a painting, planting a garden or swimming a lake knows that sorting things out physically can stimulate the same in the mind. Creative output, and the reading, absorbing and living that goes into it,  is the act through which I try to sort through ideas and find connections. 

Here we are somewhere inside a global pandemic. Paintings begun in the past for an alternative future seem strange companions in the murky present. In the first stages of the pandemic, my painting studio almost abandoned, I thought a lot about isolation, and ruminated on ideas of incubation, and metamorphosis, drawing strength from stories about untapped potential, as humans do when we try to make sense of things, we tell stories. But when it was time to title this new show, my mind was adrift. How to tell a story about being in the middle of it? 

It’s by no means a stretch or even original to think of Rapunzel, trapped in her tower. The Rapunzel tale, in it’s many many versions offers up some useful metaphors and maybe conflicting lessons for our current time. It’s ripe with useful symbolism. There is of course Rapunzel sheltered away in her tower. There’s the tower as a symbol of isolation. Maybe the lesson that locking up human desire will always result in defiance. Maybe her long braids tell us that time is our only way out. Or maybe it cynically points to survival at any cost?

Or what about the tower? Being thrown from the tower is in a Jungian sense, a collapse of our world as we knew it. It’s sudden crisis, and danger and upheaval. It’s change. But the tower is that context not all bad. As with Rapunzel, it’s a kind of liberation. 

But here I am looking ahead. And this exhibition reflects being in the middle.  For now, I just try to comfort the present. Send flowers. Sort through images, paintings and stories in the middle one at a time. Hoping this is the end of the middle.