Imagine an entire ocean in a glass of water.
Through painting-installations, I create a world of abstract objects based on narratives of water and our relationship to it. These stories are about striving toward an unreachable goal and the beautiful brokenness that becomes the purpose of the journey: encountering the loneliness inherent in the feeling of awe; the wonder inherent in the banal; and the presence inherent in a void.
By the conscious removal of specific aspects of everyday reality, I consider their purpose in the context of their absence. I breakdown narrative structures into abstract objects, dissolve linear time and collapse and expand temporal space in order to reveal the eternal moment. The eternal moment is an essential, endless distillation of the present that continually reintroduces itself.
In the space between the visceral painted surface and the constructed image, in the potentiality of a blank sheet of paper, in the edit between frames of a video or in the dialogue between romantic and conceptual practices, in the “Between” that separates memory and experience… this is the glass where I imagine- and reimagine- my ocean.
T.S. Eliot describes the rediscovery of such a space, as though for the first time, in Little Gidding (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’):
We shall not cease from our exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of the earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.