Notes - Artist’s statement
June 2002
Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there. - Cioran
Although I have come to art making relatively recently, I have been interested in what is now the subject of my art making for a much longer time. In 1977 I completed a Master of Engineering in Artificial Intelligence, somewhat naively exploring how one could simulate, and hence attempt to understand, some aspects of human learning, and by extension, of consciousness.
However, my view now is that consciousness is intrinsically unknowable. And it is what is prior to consciousness, that from which consciousness arises, that is interesting, and that drives my art process.
During the period 1988 to 1995, following a period of psychoanalysis and meditation, I became interested in vast imaginal landscapes - seen in dreams, in meditations, and in miniature in everyday objects and places. These were often fields, plains, deserts - huge arid spaces from which forms arose and into which forms decayed. Constructions and destructions into vast horizontal extents…
In Jump Zone I explored special zones in these extents that were jumping off places for transformation - as a metaphor for experiences of opening and of expanding of consciousness. I used balsa wood for its light, straight, dry grain and the ease with which lathes could be laminated to form relatively featureless planes (plains). I felt an affinity with balsa because of my experience in deep meditation of becoming a vertical, weightless, dry grain. (Seasoned balsa wood is this, and is mostly empty air cells.)
In Bird Field I introduced the aspect of sound - specifically bird song - as this was an important factor in my meditation experiences, living in a leafy suburb of Sydney, Australia. The balsa forms began to take on the function of sounding vessels as well as of landscape extents.
During 1997 to 2001 I worked on a Master of Fine Arts (Hons) thesis, An Inquiry into an Imaginal Landscape. The thesis, which is a personal account of my explorations into landscape as metaphor for consciousness, can be downloaded in adobe acrobat form.
In the thesis I describe how the fields and plains increasingly became metaphors for the agency of consciousness, for the unknowable capacity for consciousness, for that from which consciousness arises. I used the terms the pre-imaginal and the pre-conceptual for this.
In Recollecting a Proto-Scape I turned to wood carving to make forms that could be seen as arising from or decaying into the proto-scape - much as consciousness, or specifically, thoughts, arise and decay into the pre-conceptual. Now the gallery itself - or more exactly the plane created by the top surfaces of the plinths, became the plain from which the forms arose and decayed.
An example of such a work in this exhibition, intended to convey something of this feeling, is Site.
In 2002 I undertook a photographic diary On the Scape, in which I explored the experience of carving fields and plains from wood, and relating them to writings such as the Cloud of Unknowing, and those of Meister Eckhart and Thomas Traherne.
Creatures that are able to dart their thoughts into all spaces, can brook no limit or restraint, they are infinitely indebted to this illimited extent, because were there no such infinity, there would be no room for their imaginations; their desires and affections would be cooped up, and their souls imprisoned. - Traherne