This piece is part of the series called “histérica” (hysterical) in which I investigate the concept of a visual protolanguage, which is how the feminist researcher Elaine Showalter defined hysteria.

Ana Maria Farina

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I paint with a gun––a tufting gun––along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, I conjure vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. I am interested in the unconscious mind: what lives under the surface. I am attracted by the creature-like, mythological parts of being human. The resulting images are hysterical—in the truest sense of the word. Liberated from its slanderous connotations, hysteria is understood as a manifestation of the unconscious ferociously unbound. Ruptures are reborn as rugs, inviting the viewer into the home within.