Self Portraits: The ‘Rearticulating’ years (1999-2004)

Warning – lots of pictures! Read on wifi!

1999 was right after my last heroin bust. You can read the excerpt from Snakes and Ladders here. It was a pretty dodgy time to be Angela J Williams.

Hadn’t worked out yet that my problem was heroin, but needles. Slipped and fell in a pretty big puddle of uppers. Put some real effort into enhancing my track marks.

Completely lost the ability to write but was still driven by that inherent need to record. So I drew pictures.

Blue is ‘me now’ having a think. Skim if you’re just after the juicy facts. Hi Defence.

1999

Still had some words
Recovering from the bust
Coming out of a 24/7 BDSM thing
Going into what I think is another BDSM thing but which turns out to be the worst case of domestic abuse I’ve ever survived (sorry mum) – this one really nearly killed me
Throwing myself face first into the drug puddle and splashing around
Working in the sex industry to support 2+ habits
Also – officially the year I stopped wearing clothes
In these pictures I am looking for a version of myself that I can sit with. The first two pictures show a me which is restricted, weighed down, desperately crying out. The frequent nudity and submissive/loaded poses show a struggle with the very core of self, the relationship with the body. The frequent decapitation and disembodiment points to my struggle to come to terms with myself as a whole. The last picture, the page of clutching hands, shows the flexing of the hands which comes right before a big effort.

1999:1 Right after the overdose

1999:2 Heavy shadows

1999:3 The birthday no-one called

1999:4 Maybe on acid? Oh yeah, definitely on acid!

1999:5 Juggling act

1999:6 Faceless

1999: 7 Something to hold me up

1999:9 Anchors

1999: 10 Chains

1999: 11 Kick you in the face, man!

1999: 12 Well, that didn’t work.

1999: 13 But I’m still beautiful

1999: 14 Really beatuiful

1999: 15 Learning self defence

1999: 16 Sometimes it doesn’t work

1999: 17 Faceless

1999: 18 Just fucking shut up, Angela, shut up

1999: 19 Yes, Sir, anything You say

1999: 20 Where is the escape hatch?

2000

Wildly out of control
Skipping from one abusive relationship to another like some very stubborn pebble
Following each with a stay in a psych clinic, pretty stuff
Starting to get help – talk to services, etc
Homeless – mostly bed/couch surfing
Taking lots of drugs and hanging out in some very less-than-savoury joints
In these pictures, I’m infantilising my process, trying to foreshorten myself into a smaller existence. The heavy strokes in most of these pictures shows a simmering tension, a tension which was going to explode spectacularly. Tension had a bad habit of doing this before I got into therapy. The ongoing obsession with myself naked is starting to wane, but I still can’t seem to consistently give myself a head. The last picture, a relatively true to life fantasy about where I wanted to be makes me sad, makes me wish I could tell 2000 me that it’s all okay, this imagined her is coming.

2000:1 New century, new me, blah, blah, blah

2000:2 Headless jump

2000: 3 Zombie bride

2000: 4 Who actually did my PhD

2000:5 Thinking about applying to Salon Kittys

2000:6 Is this thing even turned on?

2000:7 Reset, foot

2000: 8 It’s all about banance

2000:9 Disgruntled with waiting

2001

Diary is missing
Started seeing Shrinkola, Dr Peter Young
This was the year where everything went wrong. There are not enough clichés in the world to describe the emotional colander which was my world that year.

2002

Therapy seems to be working
Taking way less drugs, still working in the sex industry but have started training as a dominatrix at Salon Kittys
Re-imagining myself out of the labels and finding a centre
Dipping into drugs, but more as play/experiment
Started bridging course to get into Uni – paid for this with a couple of road trips as a hooker, I like to say I paid for it with my ‘money box’
Wrote a 36000 word novella (still locked very tightly in a bottom drawer) to prove to myself I could write before I went
The pictures of are becoming more detailed, a more nuanced and blended view. I can look at myself more now, want to look at myself more. I’m giving things background and context, letting the images of myself become seated in the real world. These different conceptions of me are the ‘strands of Angela’ that Shrinkola and I start trying to weave into a single cohesive thread. For a long while picture three was my mascot, the me who I imagined carrying all the rest in her basket through the real world. That was fun. By that second last picture, that full face portrait, I was able to actually see a person me. I was just about to wriggle my way through the back door into Uni and I was trying to work out how they hell this version of me fitted in there.

2002:1 Loving the kerb life

2002: 2 Finding reflections

2002: 3 On the prowl through my faces

2002:4 Getting a straighter spine

2002: 5 Learning to crawl

2002: 6 To pose

2002: 7 To expose

2002:8 I looked close

2002: 9 Too close

2002: 10 Exposing the stereotypes

2002: 11 Exposing the seams

2002: 12 Finding the ‘little’ me

2002: 13 The mortal me

2002: 14 The real me

2002: 15 Still all in balance

2003

Started at Uni
Gave up needles
Started to write, for hours and hours until my hand almost cramped
Found the joy of mixing words and pictures
Passed my apprenticeship at Salon Kittys
Started doing some writing on the computer
These pictures are afterthoughts to my journaling, thinking, creating. They are nestled among pages of tight script, increasingly covered in lines, arrows, exclamations. The second and third pictures, almost street art poetry, show me starting to accept the empowering angles of my history. I don’t have words right now to tell you about the childhood terror that birthed that last picture. You probably don’t want to know.

2003: 1 I see real people, all the time

2003:2 almost rooms for pictures round the words

2003: 3 Finally getting the needle compulsion link – finally

2003: 4 Finding sympathy for the hiding places of my childhood

2004

Put most of my words in books with lines no
Kicking goals at Uni – distinction average and lots of HDs
Kicking balls at work – getting paid way too much money for it
Thinking a lot about me and who I am, but thinking so much more in words no
These pictures show the shift back into a fully articulate mode. There is no time for pictures, only time for words. Pictures of myself are now tools for planning while I write stories about killing my mother with a hammer. I start thinking about power and identity and how I can use these ideas as a safety net to keep the ~~perpetrators~~ predators out.

2004:1 Thinking/writing/editing – the magic is happening

2004: 2 Disembodied now, but only to construct the Sonja thing

2004: 3 No time for niceties, got power on my mind

2004: 4 Ever-grounding foot – now with less pressure

2004: 5 Fighting the monster of my mother

2005-Now
I’ve stopped keeping notebooks, this makes me sad. I buy notes books but so much of my world is digital now. I obviously draw much less when I’m a) not high and b) expressing myself creatively in words. But I obviously also need to draw so have recently picked up the pen and paper again but I’m looking at different things now, a different me.
Or maybe it’s the same old me but with more patience, a wider pallette, and an enhanced level of social and creative access?