ARTIST’S STATEMENT
You know that sensation when one part of you holds another part of you? Like one hand holding the other? Have you ever noticed how different the sensation is when one hand is asleep? You feel yourself as if from the outside, as others experience you. The experience never lasts very long, but it is a reminder that you cannot hold yourself in the normal course of things. I wonder if everything isn't held together like this: all of us holding one another in place, every place holding us together, us together holding things in place. Maybe that is what I am doing when I make art: waiting for that moment when one hand goes to sleep so that the other one can truly feel it - as if it was a distinct and separate thing. To momentarily become aware of all that holds me in place; the soft membrane of the space into which I am poured in the world.
What I know of this sensation, is that if feels a bit like drifting in water. Have you ever floated on your back in the ocean? That gentle sensation of being complexly moved from side to side and up and down? Feeling almost as if the motion was your own; as if it all emanated from within. Perhaps that is how it is to be in the world. And me, more or less given over to life's energetic deformations, drifting, waiting and hoping to feel the water.
You know what I like? I like looking at things from behind thick, plate glass. You can't hear a thing. I love to watch trees swaying and bending and shivering in the wind in total silence. I love sitting in a downtown coffee shop, watching people walk by. Because glass separates, so that you can imagine other people and other things as distinct from yourself - although, of course, they are not. But it allows you to feel as if you are moving and thinking at a different speed than everything and everyone else. As if you can look at things from the perspective of a lifetime, or even millenia, while they are all entangled in seconds and minutes, hours and days. Or they are all moving as if in slow motion, so that you could get up and casually walk around someone running past, stopping to look into the depths of his eyes and study the anticipation or anxiety inscribed in his features. In fact, you could walk ahead to see where he is going and return knowing what is going to happen to him. You could compare his expectations at that moment with what is about to unfold for him and in doing so feel the raw pathos of all of existence. Perhaps therefore, you could think of my artworks as thick plate glass behind which everything is temporarily silent, and you can't hear a thing.