SOULFUL HUMANS: Selene De Packh, Artist, Writer - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Usa

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Selene De Packh, Artist, Writer - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Usa

Selene De Packh's portrait with orchid - photo by Suzanne Cenci, digital darkroom postwork by Selene De Packh

Selene De Packh: " I would wish they could hear the clanging of empty pots in the streets, and understand their message"

BPP: Who are you?

Selene De Packh: In the world, I am an artist, an autistic woman, a user of computers and lover of animals… a reclusive, childless queer with graying hair living in a rustbelt city… with centuries of family history behind me and none going forward, the fragments of a four hundred year old library moldering gently in my Edwardian house.

"Corpus void looks" - created by Selene De Packh

BPP: And who you really are?

Selene De Packh: I was born under a backwards sign, called in dreams of lightning wings, driven to stir the pot- to turn things upside down- kick people in the head until they see clearly. I’ve spent my life studying the martial arts of beauty, humor & insight to deliver that blow.

"Looking into the Void" - created by Selene de Pack

BPP: If you could say something important to others who were listening, what would you tell them?

Selene De Packh: Be quiet, darlings… calm down, put the noise and the panic and unending mechanical jabber aside and notice the living environment around you… listen for the whispers from the souls of animals… cool your eyes from the digital agitation and see the dignity in the world-broken humans you pass by… know they are all sentient, all capable of staggering beauty too subtle to be perceived by frantic senses.

"Death dream" - created by Slene De Packh

BPP: What is your true dream, the one that keeps you up at night and if one day it were to come true you would feel peace and calmness in your heart?

Selene De Packh: I dream of saying something in some language or sign that can interlocute between the typical world and the divergent one in which insights are formed. I send my dreams out to pry their way between the chatter. I hold desperately to the kite strings of the storm whose Tesla coil spawns flashes that refract this enlightening: ‘ahh… I understand… we are no more or less than the wounded, shredded fragments of universal compassion… any one of us…’

"For Kalikonos" - Selene De Packh

"Stages of immortality" - created by Selene De Packh

BPP: How is life currently for the people in your country and what would you wish for them and for the planet at large?

Selene De Packh: I live in the most bloated country on the planet, in which the individual cells are beginning to decay from overconsumption. I would wish for them the courage to put down the spoons full of creamy, bleeding toxicity with which they keep their awareness of the world around them at bay in a wallow of clogged arteries of the spirit. I would wish they could hear the clanging of empty pots in the streets, and understand their message.

"Love's labor's" - created by Selene De Packh

"Garden's jewels - after the rain" - created by Selene de Packh

BPP: If you had a chance to be a child again would you choose the same life?

Selene De Packh: How could I choose otherwise? If there is any value in the decaying art of psychoanalysis, it is in bringing the alienated one to see the narrative force in his or her life. If there is still a wish to rewrite the narrative, there is an acceptance of the failure of the writer. If the writer has failed in the core task, how can he or she be competent to draft anything that would be an improvement?

From "Illuminated passages" - created by Selene De Packh

"Dakini of the penitentiary" - created by Selene De Packh

BPP: What was the exact moment that you realized what you wanted to do with your life? How did you feel at this very moment?

Selene De Packh:That is a multi-part question… I knew I was an artist in some form when I first became aware of my own existence. I have never been anything other than a vehicle for the expression of inspiration.

I knew I was a political being when I first grasped the underlying messages from tube radios and black and white televisions broadcasting an endless consumption of the powerless by the privileged. When I first heard the voices of the damaged and exploited, clearly, over the drone of the chanting of the elders of the church of the Laws of Power, I cried… hard, swollen, angry tears that have never left my eyes.

"Under the hunter's moon (littlefield)" - created by Selene De Packh

"Persian jewel" - created by Selene De Packh

"Steel city twillight" - created by Selene De Packh

When I found myself, beyond a half-century into my life, at my heart’s limit of isolation, I searched out the diagnosis of autism I already knew I carried inside me. I understand, as only one who carries that pattern of electrical currents in the brain can, that those who cannot speak for themselves over the noise of others who jabber to fill their own ears must still be heard somehow. If I have been given talents that let me seduce my way past that mindless clatter, there is no other choice for me than to serve as an amplifier for the silent. That has made my life a very simple equation at its base.

"Illuminated passages 9" - created by Selene De Packh

"Illuminated passages" - created by Selene De Packh

BPP: Would you like to tell us something we didn’t ask until now?

Selene De Packh: I am, as well as a visual artist, a writer. I have written a novel, Littlefield. Its narrator speaks in a voice that has never been heard in the arena of privilege—the voice of a queer, autistic, ferociously intelligent woman who subverts the dominant paradigm just by existing,