This is the background to my personal struggle, and an introduction to what lies behind my drive to make my art. #jenniferarmstring #darkart #primevalart #hyena #antiwestern #primitive #artist
00:00I don't normally talk about my spiritual development because it's a very difficult, fraught and harsh experience.
00:07It's very difficult, in other words, to explain and so complicated, too, that it really defies description.
00:18But if I try to explain some of my background and how my art links to my intellectual and social and other development, my background is unusual, to say the least.
00:41And my parents had an upbringing that made them very rigid, very sure of their own position.
00:52And their position was fundamentally political, very, very political, and also very much forged in the sense that they were completely right
01:08and that they had to fight for their survival by being right about their political position.
01:16And to take you a step back in that narrative, we were born, I was born, my father was born in Africa as a white in Africa, person with white skin.
01:31And so a minority culture, but also somehow implicated in white supremacy, either directly or indirectly.
01:47And I say probably quite indirectly, really, but that that was the core, the key dimension that made our situation very fraught in general and specific ways.
02:05Because people took that up as a very negative, very stigmatic identity.
02:16And so my background has that quality where my parents remained with that identity.
02:25I departed from it or attempted to.
02:28And the whole point was that they kept trying to ring me back in.
02:31And they had a lot of means to do so because they had knowledge of psychological warfare in the instrument of political endeavors.
02:48In other words, Rhodesia as a political state used psychological warfare in very, very stealthy, very extreme.
03:01And absolutely harsh and unrepentant, unremitting, you get the picture, very, very intense ways they employed psychological warfare for a political purpose.
03:21My parents did likewise toward me and really made me feel like I was struggling for my life.
03:30And in a lot of ways, due to the cortisol stress hormone in my body, I really was.
03:35I developed an autoimmune problem in my 20s.
03:41And it just went on like that.
03:45And every time I became ill or vulnerable, they put the pressure on more to convert me to their worldview.
03:54So it was not kind.
03:57It was harsh.
03:59It was a difficult, very harsh, very, very almost unsurvivable situation for me.
04:06Because I had departed from their worldview, and that was not permitted.
04:11Almost like if you're born into a family with the Yakuza or the Mafia, you might have a similar problem trying to escape.
04:19My family, not to be underestimated, they were born in the furnace of war, and they used warlike methods against me in a sense of very self-righteous,
04:34very self-certain and absolutely committed way, in that way,
04:43to really try and take control of my mind, bring me back under their worldview whenever they could, by any means possible.
