My current work is exploring the concept of refuge, and with it, personal peace.
In this piece ‘All the Houses in the Street’ I aim to infer some of the complexities around refuge and in particular, the search for personal peace and the fine line between refuge as peaceful security and captive discord.
Terraced housing: all the houses in the street may look the same, but the outside belies their individual characters. Are they places of refuge or containers of discontent to the inhabitants who live there?
The woods are my own place where I am drawn to for refuge. They are a place to be hidden; clear sight deflected through trees and dappled light. In the woods you are surrounded by nature’s cycle of new growth, living, dying and death. It is natural and unthreatening, raw and knowable. And, in the stream that runs through the forest, there is life’s energy manifested, which balances with the dryness and earth of the forest.
The moon: at nighttime the subconscious mind takes over as we ‘stream into the loving nowhere’. In our sleep and dreams we seek refuge from the day’s ‘conscious decisions and personal memories’. The typed verse at the base of the work is a poem by Rumi.
Knowing that conscious decision and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work. (from Milk of Millennia).
Repeated mantra-like it aims to underpin the atmosphere of the work.
This piece of work is currently in the Open Print exhibition in RWA, Bristol.
http://www.rwa.org.uk/currexh.htm
For a review on this exhibition see:
http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art71083
