NAYELI GARCI-CRESPO, PhD
As a creativity and embodiment coach and meditation teacher, I am interested in art as a self-exploratory and therapeutic process. The techniques that attract me most, both in my own art and in the creativity workshops I facilitate, are those which open doors to our innate creativity and intuition as full body processes, permitting the integration of our felt sense and allowing what would normally be unconscious formations to emerge. I love exercises such as movement improvisation and blind self-portraits for their revelatory power and ability to put us in dialogue with our “bodymind,” and perhaps my favorite technique of all is subtractive monotype printmaking. The process consists of spreading ink on a plate and then carefully wiping it away with a rag or brush to reveal an image. It feels a bit like creating a living Rorschach inkblot, or, conversely, uncovering an archeological artifact with sustained and painstaking attention. I enter a meditative state of deep listening in which I become remarkably curious and receptive to images from the “other side” that clamour to be voiced.
Grito (Scream)
(Monotype Print; Oil-Based Ink on Canson Guarro Superalfa Paper, 3.75” x 3.75”)
In this piece, a woman screams out black smoke, expelling her grief and outrage. This monotype was one of a series of faces that emerged when I was coming to terms with a collection of disparate events: having been suddenly repatriated to Mexico during the Trump administration, the Kavanaugh hearings, an urgent, growing, and ultimately prescient sense that hard times were coming for the world, and marching with tens of thousands of women in Mexico City to protest a rising tide of kidnappings and femicides. During the march, the family members of women who had been assassinated bravely and publicly shared their stories and their anger at the failures of the justice system. I see this as an image of pain and impotence, but also of hope, because of its raw power of release and refusal to be silenced.