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Reverberation 2021

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My recent work focuses on a challenge to create figurative paintings which defy a conventional representation of the body and present an alternative that is much more about our concious and unconcious experience of being in the world.

 

This embodiment references the relationship between our own physicality and our cerebral, societal and imaginative life, foregrounding altered states such as dreaming. It’s very important to me to contrast this intangible scenario with our inevitable, visceral experience of the world.

 

In this respect, the series Reverberation drawns on ideas from The Visible and the Invisible, an unfinished manuscript and working notes from the French phenominological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61). This text, incomplete at his death, extended his previous works to analyse subject/object dichotomies and dualistic thinking, pursuing a new understanding of the human being as world and siting philosophy back within the body.

 

My compositions focus on the human form, often unrecognizable, as if affected by the skewed and invisible forces of contemporary physics, revealing the lack of certainty in what we perceive as conventionally reliable spaces and interrelations of objects.

 

The body-subject is therefor present in my works in parallel with a quest to see the space of nothing, a process that Merleau-Ponty posited as a way to find alternative thought and meaning. This gives a route to resist the predominant consumerist, scientific civilisation and find contrasting approaches.