Deep Singers, Deep Swimmers
I swam with whales in the South Pacific, mothers and calves, male singers, above coral-studded shallows and out deep over the expanse of blue. My body engulfed by song and colour, I experienced a kind of pelagic oblivion. When one enters deep water, human construct falls away. There is no artist, woman, daughter, sister; no time, or boat, or depth, or end. Only concentrations of thought and matter, treading water at the surface, no body but the Pacific body, no body but all the bodies of all things moving through the world.
Song rang out over the great expanse of blue and all the while we were swimming sharks and their prey, manta rays, pilot whales and great pelagic fish were circling below. I looked down to see where the light fell and there was no end. My heart broke open in the water and everything that didn't belong to me poured out.
What Great Expanses One Inspires is one of four initial paintings, supported by a larger body of work inclusive of photographs, essays and the workings of a novel. Recordings of whale song I had been immersed in allowed for remembered oblivion transcribed on canvas. Migration routes, songs sung, oceanic currents, tides, epochs beginning and ending, the dissolution and resolution of a body, of the deep: these cycles informed the painter's gestures.
This work is an attempt made at recovery of the deep, the telling of a story one hopes is not passing into oblivion. The artist endeavours to make known what cannot be easily communicated: The body, immersed in song, water and colour, dissolves into sound and attention as the deep in turn is disassembled and made ruin by our kind.
Megaptera Novaeangliae's mourning notes pass into colour. the blues of peace and flood; the vermilions, oranges and seared-flesh tones of warning; the burgundies and verdant hues of the greenhouse world of many ages ago, where glassy purple seas surged under a pale green sky; and the darker shades of transition, of lost worlds, of epochs beginning and ending.
Deep Swimmers, Deep Singers looks to movements of Environmental art, including Ecofeminism and 'Art in the Anthropocene', that deal thematically with issues of ecology, connection, solastalgia–nostalgia for place that leaves us–, correlating art and aesthetics with science and offering prescriptive theories for the interrelation between humans and the environment. In an effort to stay afloat in an era of awe and annihilation, of dystopia and doom, motivated by an array of concerns understood within a dystopic framework of human / ocean interaction (ocean acidification, overfishing, sea-level rise, extinction) the artist feels a responsibility to be submerged and to tell the tale.
Drawing on traditions of abstract art, specifically theories of gestural abstraction and colorfield aesthetics and informed by theories of the Sublime / phenomenology, the artist endeavors to make known what cannot easily be communicated. Experience is translated into form, energy, color, light–and here I add water.
