Folding Shadows, Unfolding Psyche: Alchemical Transformations in Painting and Concertina Books

This paper proposes my painting and concertina sketchbook practice as an alchemical site of individuation, where material process itself becomes a mode of research and psychic transformation. Following Jung’s insight that alchemy offers a metaphor for the psyche’s transformative processes, I explore how the layered, scraped, and reconstituted surfaces of paintings, alongside the unfolding expanses of concertina books, act as psychic landscapes in which repressed or obscured material can re-emerge in altered form. In dialogue with Jungian arts-based research (JABR), I position these practices not as illustrations of theory but as theorising in practice: poietic, imaginal methods that generate knowledge through symbolic, material, and affective registers. Individuation here is conceived less as a solitary heroic journey than as a relational, intersubjective process of becoming—resonating with feminist expansions of Jungian thought. Griselda Pollock’s writings help situate this work within feminist art history and its critique of the canon. Her insistence on multiple frameworks—psychoanalysis, feminism, cultural history—offers a way of understanding painting and the concertina not as isolated objects but as cultural practices entangled with histories of gendered visibility and erasure. In this light, my gestures of veiling, folding, scraping, and layering can be read as both personal acts of psychic negotiation and broader interventions in representational traditions that have marginalised feminine subjectivity. The concertina sketchbook, with its tactile unfolding, becomes an especially potent form: a surface where traces and absences carry across pages, creating shifting constellations of memory, dream, and image. Like the canvas, it is a site of encounter—between the visible and the hidden, the personal and the cultural. By weaving together Jungian depth psychology, feminist art theoretical insights, and my own practice, I argue that painting and the concertina operate as both container and catalyst: processes in which matter and psyche coalesce to forge new ways of knowing and being.