Women and Her Symbols is an artist’s record of an in-depth reading of “Approaching the Unconscious” the first essay in Carl G. Jung’s last book, Man and His Symbols.

Women and Her Symbols is a series of 24 multimedia paintings bound together in a vertical format with the binding along the horizon. The book reveals an investigative process focused on illustrating Jung’s description of the unconscious with photo collage, painting, cut paper collage, and snippets from the source text. The original painted pages are a result of many layers, built up and torn away, painted over, pasted into, speaking to the original text with quotes and motifs, all in an effort to seek out a dream version of Jung’s text.

Woman and Her Symbols seeks to reinterpret Jung’s writing in an analytical way to find the underlying story of which even Jung himself may have been unaware. Each one of the paintings is built on a photo collage foundation of images originally taken by the artist, of everyday objects and scenes that constitute the bedrock of human experience. The painting and collage elements both obscure and reveal the content of the photo collage just as human consciousness selectively perceives the environment.

Some painted elements depict fantasy or dream imagery, while text elements, appearing sometimes as headlines or handwritten notes, anchor the images in the language of Jung and psychoanalysis in general. The original essay by Jung is illustrated with many images of all kinds and each illustration has a description. The artist has focused on the images that Jung chose to illustrate his text, and also the descriptions of the images, which constitute a kind of psychoanalysis of the stream of consciousness revealed by the images themselves. Each page contains copies of the descriptions of the illustrations recontextualized to interact with the multimedia imagery of Woman and Her Symbols.