SARA EKENSTIERNA, BSc, MSc
Sara Ekenstierna is founder of Oakstar Art & Publishing, Ekenstierna Psykologkonsult, and Oakstar Coaching & Consulting. She is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Sweden and has fifteen years of experience in the field, mainly from short term dynamic therapy, underpinned by existential thought.
Sara is an artist, a singer-songwriter, and a published writer. She was a columnist for the popular Swedish professional magazine Psykologtidningen.
Sara is currently completing a PhD by research at the University of Queensland in Australia. Her research interests include health and wellbeing, wholeness, creativity, and self-becoming. She is specifically interested in relational thought, existential-integrative perspectives including quantum existentialism and humanistic psychodynamic theory.
Scandinavia
(Oil on canvas, 92 cm x 119 cm, framed)
This artwork reminds me of the moody darkness, the changing seasons, epitomizing Scandinavia, and which inspire isolation and introspection on the one hand, and creativity and connection on the other. I imagine it was out of this quietness and reflection the great works of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and poet Edith Sodergran stemmed, which reminds us, that the light, the life force, lurks in the darkness, it is never gone we just cannot see it.
This piece might ultimately be a tribute to place, to my childhood, and to the Northern romanticism and if you will magical realism found in for instance German painter Casper David Friedrich’s work. Friedrich’s paintings explore the intimate links between person and world, observer and observed; a central theme of my current research, where I want to say that nature is neither a fiction of our construction, nor a separate objective reality in total, rather, mind and matter, subject and object, are likely participating in a continuous motion of creation. The beauty of nature gives itself to us, is revealed, but simultaneously, as Jiddu Krishnamurti noted, “the observer is the observed”, i.e., our experience of this world is always first and foremost, the experience of an embodied agent, being-in-this-world. I’d like to propose, in the vein of holistic thinkers like existential psychoanalyst Otto Rank and philosopher and quantum physicist David Bohm, whose thought forms the theoretical framework for my dissertation, that it is in and through this in-betweenness that self-becoming occurs. We become, in the comings to and goings from, on the one side an inherent wholeness, a oneness with cosmos, a relational bond to others through love, and on the other, a differentiated notion of an individual self, spanning both self-assertion, self-actualization, and disconnection and isolation.
In short, I believe the words of Swedish poet and psychologist Tomas Transtromer, best describe this painting, bringing to mind also the very process of meaningful therapy: “Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves” (From Preludes).