Techniques For Accessing The Unconscious
With Ann McCoy
Sundays - Zoom
June 26th - July 31st 2022
8pm UK time / 12pm pacific / 3PM Eastern
£140 / $175
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A six week, working seminar course for creatives led by award-winning New York artist Ann McCoy. The course will utilise various techniques for accessing the unconscious through drawing, different art mediums, journals, meditations, and readings.
The Idea for this course came from artist seminars led by Joseph Beuys, where the participants discussed new ways of thinking about art, while making studio work. McCoy knew Beuys in Germany in the 70’s. For Beuys the sacramental was in everything and an integral part of the artistic process. Marie Louise von Franz said the last time the imagination had been approached as an actual place where the inner imaginal happenings led to changes in the outer world was in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. This seminar will explore exercises used by Surrealists like Lenora Carrington and Max Ernst, techniques used by members of the spiritual branch of Russian Cosmism, as well as Jungian Active Imagination.
An example of Ithell Colquhoun’s work using the decalcomania technique.
Photograph- Oli Cowling/© Tate
Joseph beuys with students © bpk / stiftung museum schloss moyland / ute klophaus / leihgabe der ernst von siemens kunststiftung/ © vg bild-kunst, bonn 2021
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Leonora Carrington, Figuras Míticas (Mythical Figure, Dance II), 1954 oil and gold leaf painting.
What to expect
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This course will take a seminar/ studio format.
It will include drawing and diary work, sharing art work and discussions of readings.
The class will be taught from a Jungian perspective, but use a variety of texts.
All reading material will be provided on scans by Ann as much of it is now out of print or hard to get hold of.
The class will run for six weeks and sessions will be recorded.
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This is a wonderful opportunity to work with Ann who has been working deep in the fields of Jungian psychology and alchemy in her art practice for 40 years.
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Ann McCoy Dream of the Invisible College
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About Ann
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Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She is an artist with a fifty year career, and known for her large scale drawings of the dream world. Her work is found in many museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and many others and was featured in the Venice Biennale 1985 Art and Alchemy curated by Arturo Schwarz. She was awarded a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in art.
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Ann worked with Prof. C.A. Meier for twenty-eight years in Zurich and with James Kirsch in Los Angeles. She has a background in Jungian psychology and philosophy. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library. Most of her work is based on her dreams, and their relationship to alchemical texts, and Christian alchemy in particular.
Ann has lectured on art history, the history of projection, and mythology in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000. Ann now lectures on Jung and the artistic process from over fifty years of analytical experience and feels strongly that creative people have a unique approach to the unconscious, that comes from working with actual materials, and in-between dream states.
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