Everything is interconnected. And everything is interdependent.
We are part of an incredibly fortunate few, in a very fortunate era.
This is the moment, the time, the place.
It is impossible to overstate its significance.
The art I create is the expression of a necessity. I am expressing what needs to be expressed. I am part of a larger system that includes you and me and everyone we know (and don’t). And from this my work emerges. And this carries my work too. Without you here right now, my work could not exist here.
I am a living filter of my art and I interpret it to make it the best it can be. I experience it as mine. You experience the art as mine, connected to me. But in reality all of my emotions and ideas are somehow connected to everything I have encountered so far and my understanding of it. Or my intuitive understanding of it. And everything you see and feel is connected to a vast ocean of experiences that have come to this moment with you, passed on through generations before you and through your entire personal life experience. Even the tiniest things that have happened to you today influence in a way you see me and my work and this very moment.
Encountering my work and being able to feel it, or think about it, or to like it, love it, hate it… all of these emotions are related to your overall experience of yourself, the world, the universe.
I create vessels for my own experience. But they are clearly vessels for you, others, for the universe to experience itself.
Because of all this, and the awareness of this, I am incredibly interested in the lifespan of materials, the present moment, the repetition and serial acts of art making.
If everything constantly changes, then there exists an evolution of everything. Nothing stays the same, no two of my drawings are the same. No two bowls of tea are the same. No two moments are the same. Despite for all of their potential to be perfect.
Individual elements of my artwork are sometimes as tiny as a simple gesture, or a set of gestures. But in the larger context of things, and with your understanding of the matter, what matters, the universe, they can be quite monumental.
The materials I use are often as old as this planet. Or they have ancestry as old as the planet and more. They are on a journey; just as we are. They are part of this entire everything.
We are so incredibly lucky to be here right now. Not only are we in the optimistic habitable zone of a star, we are on a planet that spins at a sane rate, contains water, has a moon that moves that water in ways that support and encourage life. It’s all a miracle, really.
And we, each one of us, are the outcomes of an incredible lottery. Only one of the countless cells of our parents have united to eventually become us. And this happened before, again and again and again for generations. Back to the moment when our species was almost extinct, and beyond that beyond that beyond the understanding of being itself.
We are now here and are able to encounter each other, the lucky ones, conscious and fascinated by something quite emotionally important too.
We are creating art, we are looking at art, we are experiencing art.
(Some of us collect it.)
And this in an age when we are not just aware of the artistic creation. We are also becoming more. and more aware of the destruction, the devastation caused by our actions. The climate catastrophe is here. We are in the midst of an extinction wave. Pollution is playing roulette with the materials we find and make.
And so my art is an expression of all that. The unique moment, the emotions that are only possible through us, now, with the experience of us.
They are the observation of the way particles of all kind are used or lost or worth observing.
The necessity of all this seems to have come to me from having worked and lived around the world for decades. I have encountered and fallen in love with cultures and people and the wisdom that is in them. Then and now.
I wish we could meet and we could have a conversation about all this. Right now you can see some of the art I have created so far.
And because it is 2023, you can just move on, simply using your thumb or the mouse in your hand. This encounter can either disappear from your screen now, or it can be the beginning of a new branch in the story we are all living.
Everything is interconnected.
Everything is in balance.
Everything is destined to change.