Going to the Edge

I am a tightrope walker. I venture out from the perceived safety of my 'home' and take a step into the unknown when the urge to explore what more can I experience. I'm not motivated by excitement, as I find venturing out to be quite scary, or novelty or boredom. I put it down to expansion. The tightrope over the abyss has been an unexpected repeating motif in my work. It describes to my way of thinking, the trust that each step forward requires. I look for signs, juxtapositions, inspiration and connections. I look for these in the external world more than I used to, where my mind searches for ideas that I feel I can integrate into a painting, because my internal emotional life is non engaged. I used to paint the relationships and the feelings of who I was in tension with the role of mothering and a dysfunctional yet enduring relationship. These roles were quite restrictive, because doing them well mattered to me, and they rubbed up against the freedom of time and being that was more aligned with who I was. Because my life changed, my children grew, the relationship evaporated, and I became a solitary being, it changed my perspective. I found that I crossed that abyss, walked the tightrope and landed in the rooms of another construct. In this place i do have the time and the space, but I have no emotional filaments on which to relate to the world. This caused the work to resolve the questions that I ask, because within the kernel of every work I create, is a deeper essential question, from a conceptual perspective. The emotion has drained away and the question is the key. The work has the marks of a different environment. When I noticed this about my work the other day, it perturbed me. I have always been 'moved' to paint. My emotional world had informed my work more than anything beyond my physical world, the political world, the intellectual world.

Sketch of juggler on a tightrope.

I see a sculpture from the driftwood at the beach. It remeinds me of the sketches I make when I'm imagining how that feeling of walking along the tightrope feels like.

A Single Life 2002

Once I notice something, the 'splinter' as I call it, I endeavour to attend to it. To remove it if possible. Noticing that the lack of emotional engagement has meant that the incoming tides of thought, which leaves their marks on the landscape of my mind, are not as evocative or meaningful, I am now alert to this. What works will now be appearing? I will seek to engage an emotional element by taking that tightrope into the realms of the underbelly and meet the other. There is bound to be many an argument to be had within as I dare to engage with the self that has been deeply sleeping oblivious to the light that is about to be shone upon it.

Meeting the shadow self.

Removing The Splinter, oil on canvas, 152 x 101cm 2026