The Spirit In Matter

Like early man staring into the dancing flames of an open fire, exercising a primitive imagination. Like a shaman of old raking through the ashes, divining messages from the spirit world. As I grew up, my unconscious would fill the sweeping valleys of a humble, decidedly ugly relic of 1970s DIY interior design: the Artex swirls on the ceiling of my bedroom.  Bringing them to life as I lay there half asleep.

It is this alchemical animism of seemingly dead matter that I hope to recreate in my work. The paintings themselves the direct result of a playful interaction between myself and paint, emerging from a state of participation mystique. I begin with my hands, sculpting a textured surface. I then work intuitively creating a frenzy of marks colour, evoking subtle, hypnogogic forms,  fostering them as they emerge. I then cause disruptions fracturing the picture plane, through interventions such as rotating, masking and wiping. As the process repeats the paintings begin to set their own tone, slowly reaching a state of compositional harmony.  The final object becomes an amalgamation of all previous layers, an iconographic representation of a complex web of integrated non-linear relationships. They are Magical Objects, material bridges to the unconscious. With the aim of evoking a super sensible, animistic reality.

My main concern is with societies relationship to myth and how post enlightenment thought predicates itself solely on rationality. (Myth being viewed from a Jungian perspective as the projection of intrinsic, unconscious, semi-autonomous psychological functions- archetypes). To me this disconnect from the function of myth, is akin to a cultural amnesia and is responsible for mankind’s dissolution with itself and the earth. I am interested in how forms of human knowledge that base themselves on storytelling, are being threatened by a world of data, computers and instantaneous excess to information. I am exploring the phenomena of inspiration as one of the last remaining socially permissible links to the ‘supernatural’, which has led to an exploration into the idea of the artist as Shaman. Exploring the potential of shamanic techniques of ecstasy and altered states of consciousness within the creative process. Looking to progress painting through looking back, to archaic modes of being, favouring a spiralled approach to time. A view advocated by the likes of Monica Sjöö and Barbara Moor. In opposition to the current prevailing fiction of life-as-history, that sees life reduced to a mere sequence of events; marching forever onward in the name of indefinite progress.