In attempts to articulate
why I make the things I do, I shall begin by breaking things down into a few
over-arching (and overlapping) categories. I should note, however, that the
idea of categorical distinctions comes up quite frequently in my work - particularly
in my desire to make works that simultaneously acknowledge and abolish such
distinctions and the tensions therein. Nonetheless, I shall break things down,
if only to weave them back together once more.
Three primary influences on
my studio practice include biology, psychology, and theology. Each area of
study functions on its own level yet all three find a common denominator in my
work. They do so particularly in my dealings with the flesh, which signifies
for me a meeting point for dualisms of all sorts. Flesh is a barrier, a wall,
denoting interior from exterior (subject from object), yet it’s full of its own
physical intricacies, hollows and bumps that muddle those very distinctions.
The flesh is also the toughest and most sensitive of organs, a vessel through
which we experience both the most painful and most pleasurable of
sensations. I choose to work with the flesh because it’s what we all know
best – it is a charged imagery to which every bodied being can relate on some
level, be it physical, metaphorical, or metaphysical. “Man is the meeting point
of two worlds.” (Nikolas Berdyaev)
My studio practice is rooted
in the notion that a richness can be found in the blurry space between
alternatives. Opposites exist, yes, but very rarely do we find them in
isolation of the other. One may only exit a space, if first it is entered. A
cup may only be emptied, if first it is filled. Relational verbs such as these
are defined by their opposites and couldn’t exist without the other. “What is
not there formed by what is. What is there formed by what is not.” (Bruce
Hainley)
Herein lies the significance
of casting processes in my work: positives shapes and negative spaces,
constantly informing one another. I like to invert and/or blur the boundaries
between these two states in attempts to evoke feelings of familiar ambiguity,
comfortable tension, and reluctant desire.
Though I’m quite willing to
acknowledge that the gaping orifices and protuberances in my work may become
imbued with a certain pycho-sexuality, I’m much more interested in the
existential opinion that the Freudian model is merely a localization of an
original, ontological (and pre-sexual) fascination with holes. While the
Freudian model speaks of an “original” hole that renders subsequent holes only
metaphors, the existential model suggests that, in a sense, all holes plead
obscurely to be filled. They are appeals to the triumph of the full over the
empty, of existence over nothingness.
This recalls a symbolic
notion of lack (“manqué”), which Jacques Lacan suggests is the root of all
desire. C.S. Lewis speaks of a similar yearning to which he refers by the
German word “sehnsucht.” He echoes both existentialists and theologians past
when he admits, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world
can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for an other
world.”
Søren Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism suggests that
the universe is fundamentally paradoxical and that its greatest paradox is in
the transcendent union of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. Not one or
the other, but both. Opposite, yet the same. Now, but not yet. Christian
theology (religiosity aside) is made up of conflicting, colliding, and
coalescing alternatives that find their resolve in the oneness of Christ.
Thus physical oneness becomes a metaphor for spiritual oneness. Flesh acts as a metaphor, but is tangible nonetheless- at once a barrier and a carrier of both matter and meaning.
