Sound of No Shore: Diminutive Duties
These works present small-scale human figures within an empirical world of their own design, as if the natural world was a manifestation of their own imagination. The machinations of psychic energies dwarf these figures, implying an effect far beyond the active participation of their feeble bodies.
The Grace of This Transmission Spreads an Arc Across the Sun
All of these images are large gouache and mixed-media works on paper. The average size is 250x150cm.
This image shows two tiny figures labouring to wield an unearthly wand through floating ghost cliffs that appear dimly in the stratosphere. The sun is a devastating eye of consciousness beyond the horizon of everything they know.
One Blind Eye
This work refers to the mechanics of vision as it occurs behind the eyes, within the dark inner space of the head. In my notebooks, I had alluded to the eye as a dead thing, a lump of brute matter unable to ‘see’ beyond the materialistic surface of things.
This image depicts the projection of blindness behind the eyes, resulting in the emanation of a dark orifice through which passes a bone white barb. Two phantasmagoric figures seem to control this apparatus, creating a secret passage through the blind eye, from a dead bone of vision. The entire structure becomes a radiant conductor of other-worldly dimensions.
Piercing the Flesh Domain
The botanical form that emerges from the ear of the sleeping figure is an exotic aerial that operates in an atmosphere as sensitive and secretive as the surface of our flesh. It is a receptive organism within ‘the skin of the world’.
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground
This image shows the layered sub-structures that make up an environment, each resonant with its own material nature. An enormous head-form resides in one layer of the picture, a subterranean pool of thought beneath it. The song emitted by the fairy-like figure within this wilderness has material substance also. The title of the work was taken from a Blind Willie Johnson tune from 1927.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Uproot
3. Diminutive Duties (You Are Here)