Trauma & Art

The long seashore of childhood – Tonya Alexandri (2004)

‘Anything can become an inspiration to draw or create – external stimuli or internal experience. It may be an emotional or sensational experience, a memory, a movie scene, a page from a book, dream, a photo, an object, a face, something or someone outside my window….. The stimulus that triggers the desire or urge to narrate through images is then transformed through the artistic process into something new or different. It becomes a visual narrative with multiple underlying stories. My understanding and interpretations of whatever I have produced may be totally different from what the viewer perceives and understands and each image contains emotions, secrets and life experiences only visible to me. The first drawing below was inspired by a photo of a child that for various reasons appealed to me. Specifically, I came across the photo that inspired the following drawing while leafing through a book of photos I was given as a gift by an old acquaintance….. The book contained photographs taken by Andreas Empericos, a Greek poet, psychoanalyst and photographer. It was one of a series of photos he had taken of his son, Leonidas, between the years 1958 and 1971’.

The same collection of photos inspired the second drawing, which I have used in the series of artworks and posters I created in 2012.