In Tori Amos's Album each song represents a certain part of Scarlet's journey and this is indicated by the booklet that accompanies the album, making the work of art as a whole the entire album including case and booklet.
This Album has themes in common with ideas I had been working on for some time and I became a fan of the work listening to it often during my time working on my project in the third year. My first ideas for artwork exploring identity and the search for identity where inspired very much from this album which is why I feel it important to reference here.
The area from which I lived with my parents is in the Somerset levels, a particularly flat area of Somerset which used to be underwater until barriers where put in place and the land drained revealing a fertile moorland. I often walked sections of the Parret river whilst listening to this album infusing the work and Tori Amos personally with the memories of those journeys. The front and back cover of the album show's Tori as Scarlet stood on a long straight road in an incredibly flat land presumably in America, an image which spoke strongly to me being a person who often walks the levels in Somerset. There is a romanticism in walking a landscape and being exposed to the elements. For myself personally I moved with my family to the village Martock in Somerset when I was 11 years old, only seven miles away from the town of Yeovil where I lived previously. My romanticism began straight away as I took long trips into the countryside and searched almost daily for a female figure whom I was convinced I would find out in the countryside. This female character was a source of romance and developed to represent freedom and emotion. I continued to hold close this idea of a woman whom I believe now to be my Anima, a Jungian archetype who is represented as the opposite sex and holds characteristics which one simultaneously looks for in a partner and in them-self. My character developed as I grew older taking on the character of Kate Bush after I discovered her Music. For me Kate Bush was inextricably linked with the countryside around me and I sought to make art which could invoke the feeling which I felt from listening to her music.
As I aged and my view of women and myself changed so did my Anima, unable to remain as a pure character of virtue after my sexual development. I was introduced to Tori Amos's music through a friend who suggested her music because of my love of Kate Bush and that Tori Amos was influenced largely by Bush also. I embraced Amos and my anima changed form into the tall and sexual redhead whom stays with me today. This transition may be seen as the transition from the 'Mary' stage to the 'Sophia' stage of the anima development,the third and fourth stages. Mary is virtuous and unable to have sin attached to her and Sophia is an integration of good and bad aspects creating a well rounded character.
Until very recently when ever I imagined ideas for performances I would image how they looked in my mind and in place of myself I would have this redheaded woman. This seemed to happen without my control. I toyed with the idea briefly of bringing this character out into the world through cross-dressing and performing the persona but this idea felt very uncomfortable and according to Jungian theory the embodiment of the Anima is very unhealthy. My first performance ideas centered around a search and this is the theme I have returned too in my recent work. One significant relationship that my relationship I have with the countryside around Martock and my Anima is that of my relocation from Martock to Cardiff, from the countryside to the city. The years spent in Martock set up a foundation from which my current work is built upon. The shifting of place and the separation of myself from the landscape in which I invested so much of my emotion places Cardiff for me as a location of estrangement. The Album 'Scarlet's Walk' was recorded by Tori Amos in England despite its subject matter and story being about the United States of America. This to me seems a significant set of locations, to discuss a location as a large and powerful landscape in which one feels lost and out of place in from a location in a different and older country which has a long-standing relationship to the other.
"Can someone help me I think that I'm lost here, lost in a place called 'America'"
-Tori Amos, Wednesday in Scarlet's walk
