Organs of Special Sense: Spore
These works describe the extension of desire into the external world as a physical connection; a ‘spore’ that emits its longing and is also receptive to the fertile environment.
I imagined this organ as a live nerve ending or magical antler that reaches out to connect earth to sky, matter to desire. Birds are represented as spirits that are attracted to these pollinated antennae; they extract vital essence and depart for other realms.
In this sense, the work is a direct development of Transmigratory Passage of the Death Wish yet it uses more specific models to explore themes.
Reef Break
The bottom of many of these smaller works depicts the surface and interior of the eye in cross-section, as if it were a foreign land. The eye is like a port, a burning lake, separated from the greater ocean and sky by a reef that is the skull.
In these works I envisioned the interior landscape as having a passionate, tropical climate from which vision is immersed in its own feedback, as it erupts outwards.
Fever Pitch Stare (170x110cm)
A tendril-like spore emerges from the eye like a plant from a swamp, or an extension of the optic nerve. At the top of the spore is a small carved head, charred by its journey through fiery regions.
Allergy (160x115cm)
The head at the root of the image is like a burnt seed, from which an enormous dark growth reaches towards a shadow behind the sun; this is my eye. The bird perched upon the flower dangles a filament of pollinated seed from the eye. This agitates the sun, which intensifies the vision.
The Sweet Mystic Bliss of Failure (160x115cm)
The work describes a towering pinnacle of forlorn hope that emanates from a figure who has accepted his limitations below. The dismal confines of the artist’s studio take the place of the interior head-space.
The artist extends an aerial in desperation or hopelessness. Sometimes when creative exhaustion sets in, new-found directions bloom unexpectedly.
Hush (113x92cm)
A bird extracts a strand of silence from the ear.
Eye Bloom (100x80cm)
A bird pollinates an apparition of the retina.
The following images describe a type of growth that incubates under the cover of darkness. They are spirit plants that release fertile spore from the interior world of the mind.
Mushroom forms were to reappear frequently throughout later work, most notably within Fertile Ground. These forms evoke the dark bloom of the eyeball, the interior mantle of the mind or speech balloons that intoxicate the beings who come to propagate them.
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