Fertile Ground - Mind’s Eye
These works portray imprints of thought-activity that the stony head generates, exploring the way that vision of the external world might connect to an inner vision of the spirit through tunnels and filters. I describe the delivery of visual information into an expanding world inside the mind, as if it were an external environment.
I represent the passage of sight behind the eyes like a diagram projected in three dimensions, yet flattened out as if it were a primitive tracing or the fossilised development of an ancient life-form.
There are suggestions of facial forms of spirits that emanate from within the head.
This is an allusion to a receptive state of being that resides behind what we think we know. This spirit is witness to the act of seeing, rather than the thing seen. The work displayed above is oil and woodcut on linen, and measures 1.6x1.2m
I refer to the channelling of vision from the outside world into an interior domain in an earlier period of work, Puma Search.
I imagined that the focusing of two eyes at a single point might create a type of dissection of that point so that our vision crosses over and expands on the reverse side of that point, behind the surface of material reality.
This might happen if we project our perception outwards, like visual radiation, or as we receive a concentration of light onto the single point of our optic nerve.
The work adjacent is ink and gouache on paper, as are the three images displayed below.
I made paintings that were variations on this theme, depicting tunnels behind the eyes and representing the floating form of the interior of my face. Interior channels emanate visual phenomena, become plant-like growths or provide passage for entities who inhabit the interior realms.
The two large paintings below show the interior bloom of sight as fertile sprouts, germinated by winged beings. These works relate to forms described in Uproot from Sound of No Shore. The first image measures 1.3x1.7m. The work on the right is another example illustrating ideas explored in Transmigratory Passage of the Death Wish in Song of Substance. It measures 2.2x1.5m.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Rising Stone
4. Mind's Eye (You Are Here)
5. Undergrowth
