"End up" 2008. Copyright Alice ODILON.

 

 

 

As a french woman photographer, I’ve devoted my passion

and my prose to photography.

(Leonard Shengold  maintains that is this vital connection

of prose and passion that  constitutes insight.)

…..And through photography and with it, to women rights.

 

 

 

Practising Fine Art of Photography gave me access to reality

and palpable thoughts and brainy feelings.

Art drove me through a long philosophic research, vital search of sense

of my life and my destiny.

I spent 25 years working about woman identity, my embodied soul,

my anorexic self and my healthy self, and my unconscious mind,

living as a blind woman

led by her secret unconscious.

I didn’t know what I was doing, I created pictures

I didn’t understood but I went ahead.

I was anorexic, disembodied person, wit a huge

unlived power, sharp-eyed, seeing myself instead

to feel myself. 

I didn’t see with my body, I saw it,

I had an "out of body" disembodiment,

I felt the monstruous lack of my own body.

I was not in my body, I thought it, I didn’t feel it.

I had a metaphorical body image, I dreamed my body.

I  saw me as a X, a ghost dressed in a white blouse

gesticulating in a naked landscape.

 

 

"First ghost in a garden". 1977. Copyright Alice ODILON. All rights reserved.

 

My body was a "body image" and was not transparent but

like a death skin (a shade)protecting me from the looks

that could kill from my Mother.

I stayed alive but without my body.

I was a sort of Peter Pan.

If I would lost my shade I would die.

I was expecting a lot about my self model,

this death skin, this ultime shade.

It was my only perception of myself

and believed in it as my identity,

my unic true supreme identity.

So I was happy to not being in my struck dumb body

I’ve had sacrified for my Mother, until the day

it decided to scream as a huge wound, 

a wide opening burning hole with a blood lava flow and tears.

 

 

"Little ghosty girl trying to reunit top and bottom".1977. Copyright Alice ODILON. 

 

Then my body compelled me to deal with it as a team

with my self model, or leave.

This ultimatum of suffering haled me to choose

between total immersion in self-model  or make

an accomodation with real "bloody" body 

and my brainy head, and therefore continuing to live.

A sort of Epiphany had happened in my life:

I was able to bridge between my feelings and my thoughts,

between my self-model and my embodied body,

between my inner and my outer body.

I’ve understood that {"we are not single, indivisible whole,

but there are parts of us that can become affected, and parts

that remain separate and therefore able to be an internal healer".}

(Matthew Campling-Therapy Today/June 2006).

 

 

"Le leurre". 1977. Copyright Alice ODILON. No Clone is free.

 

I recovered the energy to laugh and to feel pleasure,

pain, without fear.

My symptom of the emptiness vouching for my own survival

and security of my self-model, became a {"momentory twinge"}.

(Ellen Siegelman – Metaphor and meaning in Psychotherapy).

Because emptiness asks finally for supply of food

or feelings or relationships.

I became to have bulimia crisises which drove me

to loss of self control.

Coming back to my self-model after vomiting, exhausted,

thoroughly purged and emptied, I was obliged

to admit allowing food or outer world to come inside me.

I became able to override time to time my hegemonic target of emptyness.

It became just a dream and not anymore a moral

and physical obligation.

I knew I had to compromise my absolute faith of emptyness

in order to taste my life, to enter in my life.

The metaphor of emptyness using by my body

to express  my psyche, told I felt invisible, I didn’t feel visible.

My emptyness experience of the anorexic figure

was as if it was real.

I was feeling ghostly and it was extremely uncomfortable.

I saw my self as a soul dressed in a white blouse

floating in a landscape.

The only thing I was sure was that people considered

only my body image, and that I saw them only as images,

unreal persons.

I didn’t get access to my feelings.

But practising photography gave me the possibility to confront

my fantasy with the palpable reality;

to paste them together,

and then to play with them, and finally to leave them co-exist.

 

Alice ODILON