Texo Vitae
This series investigates the relationship between the way I sense, and the way that I come to understand direct experience. Whether conscious or no, there are specific things that I choose to notice in the first place and then I choose to either acknowledge or discard in the second place. These choices are powerful representations of my own self-contained worldview. However, the way I assimilate this experience is far from self-contained; it has evolved in particular historical cultural contexts and scientific paradigms.
The goal of Texo Vitae is to complicate a simple representation of everyday physical experience. In doing so, I want to question the myth of the universal secular; the idea that given a world of shared mass experience, we all assimilate that experience in different ways. I want to examine the effects of tradition, culture and philosophy on the worldview that I have both constructed for myself and inherited from the world around me. I use the different materials and processes as vehicles to glimpse complex layers of context; layers that I feel I must peer through in order to at least partially examine my own life. I count on everyday imagery combined with these layers to convey the different inherited and acquired languages that I use to tell myself the everyday story of my everyday existence.
Each material, each process intended to add to the chorus with a strong clear voice.
tenuous tapestry of nylon netting,
oil Paint soaked through raw linen
encaustic soaked through oil paint and linen,
binding all to the mahogany panel beneath
pigmented Encaustic layered on the surface
encaustic medium, a semi transparent texture
impasto oil paint on the surface.
incomplete linen foundation
dyed and inked Okumi mahogany panel supporting all.
- beyond the humans, beyond the solid mahogany panel,
lies the deeply woven richness of the forest
humans float upon an oil-on-paper sketch
set apart from the world
of wood and tapestry and woven canvas
that they inhabit
Human mediation:
does it provide
an open invitation into the
solid, opulent, woven world
that can be sensed?
Or does it guard and gate-keep
A barrier between the world is sensed
and the world that is understood?
Cotton twine,
sisal twine,
manila rope,
hemp rope,
and undyed wool;
these make up the underlying structural tapestry of the land.
They lend form and definition beyond the capability of flat colour.
Detail - flat figure
Even though I think she feels like a glued-on bit of paper,
In truth, the figure is painted directly on the raw birch panel.
She is the flattest, most embedded part of this work.
Encaustic paints bind
the warp threads,
the woolen gathering of humans
and even the human-made reinforcing steel bars
to the panel.
...and encaustic paints depict the strangely separate animal figure
mother and child
afloat but most definitely not adrift
in a vessel
mother and child
composed in a secure but open-ended
triangular structure.
A solid historical construction,
a time-tested way of being
At once tightly coherent but open ended;
At once static but moving with formidable force through the world.
mother and child
afloat but most definitely not adrift
in a vessel
mother and child
composed in a secure but open-ended
triangular structure.
A solid historical construction,
a time-tested way of being
At once tightly coherent but open ended;
At once static but moving with formidable force through the world.