This series of pieces involved gluing white circles onto canvas. I layer them and build a kind of embossed look. Then I circle punch my oil pastel circles and glue some on top. The pieces didn’t feel finished though so I began cutting out images of tiny people and placing them on top of the circles.
When I started placing images of people on the circles, it reminded me of Joseph Campbell’s symbolic meaning of the circle. He used the circle to symbolize the Hero’s Journey: The hero leaves his comfort zone, struggles with others and himself, events reach a crisis, he is victorious, and he returns home transformed. This is a brief explanation of the hero’s journey, but the idea is that life requires round trips from consciousness into the unconscious and then return to consciousness with new awareness about one’s self.
