The Story Told as a Conversation

Liam Marsh: What’s it inspired by? 

Josie Alexandra: Shatters of Metallica continues with the questions I have been working on in my painting since we lived at Sabato Village (2021), {Naarm, “Australia”} — how to externalize, move through and process the visual energies I see through somatic practices. Whether that is through EMDR, Acupuncture, Meditation, or Sounds. Often, it’s a combination of these processes, as is the case in this painting. 

The first point of inspiration was from a warm up breathing exercise in a Tantric Massage session I had in March, where the practicer and I were sitting facing each other and doing a breathing exercise of breathing bubble spheres from our own root, heart and third eye chakra around the other person's respective chakras. When it came to feeling my root chakra have a bubble wrapped around it, I had this strong sensation of all this cold, grey, steely metallica energy being sucked out of my belly. That was the base reference experience for the colours and tones I was inspired to use. 

Fast forward a week and I was laying in bed feeling very heightened, cramps in my belly and the nerve pain down my legs. And, well, even though during the Tantric Massage session we had planned not to work on stuff to do with that area of my body, it kinda came up and so for the next few weeks I was just dealing with it you know, a flare up of cramps, I’d be at a station in central London, in awe of the view of the river and the city skyline with tears flow and my body just overwhelmed and tense, so that Sunday afternoon laying in bed, the cold, gray, steely metallica energy vision came back to me, and I got up, splash dashed some gray paint onto the canvas next to my bed and shortly after I was back in bed but feeling in a better way, knowing this painting will be a place to contain the grief. As Robin Wall Kimmerer would say “a grief container”.  

Of course the painting has since evolved, and I can see so many stories in it. It’s architectural in the way I was trying to explore in my thesis on the architecture of thinking and spaces. It’s very sonic, I can see the soundscape for it. I like to think it’s sci-fi ish, and in some way inspired by digital culture and technology, even thought its analog. Like I can see all the little details as frozen moments in a frame, so the finished painting is cinematic and sonic. Which brings us back to the second question or desire, I am trying to find the answer too, and the person with the right skills to expand on the work you started for me: of seeing the paintings as the blueprint for rendering them into digital virtual spaces. “Interior landscapes” feels cliched and wrong because it’s the relationship with the world, with mysticism / sci-fi, with another person who activates these somatic visions, often this other person is in the role of the healer, be that vocal teacher, therapist, medical practitioner. I see my painting practice as “rituals of relations” - I think this new body of work will play with this idea of “whispers of history echo through me”

Maybe I can say my paintings are the stuff of sci-fi or metaphysics or spiritual or somitic visions but I feel so much joy and excitement during the painting process. You know, that Josie that is very child-like and speaks in sonic ditters over words, that's who gave the painting all the little details of tone, line and expressiveness.