It all started with drawing. It is all drawing still, somehow. My drawings grow and they intersect. They are an intersection of materials, ideas and moments. My photography and my ceramic work is based on my drawings. All is a growing process somehow started somewhere and then on its way through me and hopefully to you. I write in a similar way too. A tiny idea or an observation slowly becomes a larger and larger something. Or perhaps a different something. In a way I am simply expressing what goes on in me and through me. I used to create a division between drawing and photography. It took decades to realise how they are all connected to the same something. Ceramics too. It’s all materials and thoughts and ideas and then more materials and ideas and thoughts. Some of them very old and some of them not even born yet.
It all started with drawing. My second memory is of drawing. And by then I was already in a room with the walls covered by drawings. Some were visible and as high up on the walls as I could possibly reach.
But there were so many more, hidden in places, under surfaces, in books, everywhere, everywhere drawings. In me.
When we escaped to West Germany, and I was ten/eleven then, it was drawing that allowed me to communicate even before I knew anything in German. Before I was able to slowly understand why anything was happening the way it was, the odd freedoms in seemingly irrelevant places and restrains in others.
And I come back to drawing again and again. Even this small text here is a drawing. And even this text here is a drawing with particles or something much older than this page, this device, this head. Line after line I am drawing a circle of thought. Line after line I am trying to push myself out of the current restraints of reality and into a parallel something that exists outside of time and space. And I am doing this by using a device that is literally buttons on a board. Or keys. Each key unlocking a tiny piece of universe. Particles among particles are falling into place.
The best part of it all is when I am not actually writing this. Or when I am not drawing this. When it is clearly a different something that does. Or maybe not something or someone. It feels as if it all had been there waiting to be done and I just happened to dip my skull into the invisible yet sparkling stream of something and out comes the message.
Out come the patterns. Objects. Photographs. And they then later find a response in a completely different text, or place or time.
The particles connect. The object emerges. The words flow onto the screen and then on and on and on.
I love it when various clays slowly turn into a bowl and then slowly become a togetherness or an object and it is clearly related to others I have made before, or something made before or perhaps they wanted to be made anyway.
And if the bowls had a consciousness of their own and they were to look at the lineage of bowls that are in the house, they would probably arrive at the idea that maybe there has been someone who has been creating them. But maybe not. Maybe they have been evolving from the slightly awkward ones to the ever more refined, but still weird. Maybe they would refuse to think that they had been created by someone they can’t understand as existing, some other bowl or a drawing? A text?
They could perhaps assume that they have emerged out of the universe of all possible bowls and drawings and texts. And that they are a gift to the world, the chosen bowls and drawings and texts. Or they could refuse to believe that anyone created any of them. What conclusions could they possibly arrive at from their point of view and their limitations? The drawing would assume that everything was flat, the text would assume that everything had a beginning, middle and end but was generally a string. Then the bowl would probably have a chance to see it in a most complete way? But who am I, to say any of it? None of them would even be aware of their own limitations. And I think that most likely neither am I
Or any human?
It started with drawing. Or all is drawing perhaps. Or all is a bowl. A snapshot.
Or much can be described in a text. Especially when it is read out loud. Like a colourful moving drawing? Or a drawing sculpture with words on it? A singing origami bowl? A photograph of it. A moving one.
What are the origins of it all? Or are we actually still at the very beginning of everything, staring at an ancient sky. Moving away from us at the moment. Just to collapse in the next few billion years. It would take a very long time for us to even realise this is happening. Unless obviously we somehow managed to experience the message, perhaps from the over 90% of the universe we still have not the slightest idea about?
I might need a tea.
