Caroline Absher: The Silver Cord

What is an artist supposed to do? 

Not only are there infinite ways of answering that question, at the moment there are multiple ways of asking it. I mean, like, what does one do in life? Or when a paramilitary coup is dismantling your country’s government and trumpling the rule of law?   

Like many artists in the first months of this year, the ominous start of the 21^st century’s second quarter, the New York painter Caroline Absher felt completely at a loss to grapple with the outside world, a feeling only amplified when working on a new body of work.

Trying to introduce some calm into her world, Absher started meditating. It helped quiet her mind at first, but soon, to her surprise, it also started bringing her unexpected visions, flashes of memory and insights into her past, both imagined and real—“deeply buried things and beautiful colored shapes along with states of calm I had never achieved,” she says. 

So not only did it feel natural to start incorporating some of these flashes and shapes into new paintings, Absher took it a step further and began trying to portray the actual processes and motions in her mind of the warring forces and emotions that she was experiencing (since taming them was clearly out of the question).  Becoming almost fully abstract, Absher’s new paintings began to represent various kinds of conflicts that the artist  needed to reconcile on a daily basis. The pink-yellow pastel calm of clarity and order versus the jarring, jagged chaos of unfettered, earth-toned expressiveness. The desire to open and expand one’s curiosity to all fronts versus the need to close, filter and protect one’s inner self from an overwhelm of information. 

“There’s an interesting soft beauty in these that contrasts with a different anergy and darkness that’s quite violent” says Absher. “And that’s something that I think about all the time, but I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it on purpose in these paintings.”

Having experienced nearly out-of-body experiences when meditating, Absher also became fascinated with the ancient idea of the silver cord, a mythic link that tethers the human body to its soul. Today it’s a central concept to the theory of astral projection, but to Absher the silver cord has many strands. The daughter of a neuroscientist, Absher believes there are any number of ways to look at the mind-body consciousness that bring new color and depth to its still-mysterious nature. No matter what anyone claims, no form of  science or spirituality has even come close to mastering it yet. 

In a way, Absher personified the silver cord in her works through vague figural outlines. These ghostly, sketchy presences act almost like mediums in the media, standing in for a perceiving, higher self. They are watchers, to use Absher’s terminology, helping mold, sort, mediate and modulate the cacophony. But they’re far from passive spectators. One rides a horse, one takes winged flight, one curls up with a fox.

The resulting paintings, fittingly about the size of a doorway, are marked departures from Absher’s more representational works in which human figures were often confronted with eerie hypernatural phenomena like great branching lightning bolts or the aurora borealis. (In those, the silver cord might be perceived as a link between an earthly observer and unearthly phenomena.)

But even in her works’ new abstract presentation, Absher exults in the way that the eye—the artist’s or the audience’s—seeks for patterns, faces, bodies, and meanings. “One aspect of these works I love is something that only happens in person,” says Absher. “From far away, they’re very abstract, but the closer you get the more you feel your brain tugging at you, asking what am I looking at? What is it? Where is it? And the figures just sort of jump out.” 

The mind, like the artist, is always trying to inject meaning into what it sees—to try and find if not a happy ending, then at least one that makes some kind of honest and authentic sense of the chaos. 

That is what an artist is supposed to do.  

David Colman