This latest piece remains untitled because it feels more like a one-sided conversation than a statement on a theme. I’ve been asked a few times what it means, and I don’t have a real answer for that either. Making art right now feels the way I imagine most activities do in these times, cumbersome and fragile.
The more infallible we believe our convictions about the world to be, the farther the fall when those beliefs crumble. Not all deaths are equal, surely, and this particular point of reckoning can leave us very much blinded and rooting around in the dark. In that specific, all-encompassing vulnerability, we see whether or not the tension between hope and honesty can bear the weight of our many apprehensions, our guilts, and our fears.
So what leads us and who can we actually trust? How do we know if it's our wounds calling us to action and not altruism as we’d like to believe? Why do we deny ourselves the perfectly acceptable starting point (maybe the only starting point) of admitting we don’t know? Can we take refuge in the physicality of the world even as we question whether or not it exists in the way we think it does? Is our base state feral, or is it love? In these times, even these questions feel small.
But the one that seems the most urgent to me is whether we can regain trust in our bodies after long stretches of time where the most compassionate stance we can manage to adopt towards them is suspicious resignation. Maybe the question of who we can be to ourselves is the one to ask before deciding who we can be to one another. Maybe there’s not as much difference in the two as it seems.
Many thanks owed to wildlife photographer Ron Dudley, who allowed me to use one of his magpies as a reference for the bird in this piece. You can read more about him and see his work by visiting his website and blog.
