Power is seemingly everywhere – in our languages, norms, practices and in art.
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Yet, art also offers us life worlds beyond power.
BECOMING UNDONE
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My painting quest has been one which makes its slow-burning, ecstatic and unconscious way through vulnerability, rage, desire – towards the fullness and dynamism of a liminal imaginary[1] -as an aesthetic practice for becoming undone and of being-with one another, and the world, beyond power.
The titles of my UK exhibitions - Pulse 2001, Coming Alive 2013, Taking Risks 2014, Going South 2015, Living the Fold 2017 and Towards Deep and Radiant Time 2018 - frame something of the ethical and political ambitions of this painting quest to undo mastery and exceed representational and identarian thinking.
Always located at some kind of oscillating and phenomenal edge, between, for example, the sub-liminal and the sur-real, body and landscape, inside and outside, form and drive, line and volume, hand and eye, abjection and eros, transformation and repression, fullness and risk etc., this liminal and pluralizing matrix folds vulnerability, rage, desire and the female body into an aesthetics of the sublime. Beyond The Terror and Pleasure of The Colossal, or The Defeat of Understanding, or The Un-Representable ‘Is It Happening? – the oscillating and liminal grammars of this sublime painting practice problematize fixed boundaries, mastering identities and representational categories - to keep the life-force of pluralizing oppositions in play, and in so doing to render us, artist and audiences, affectively at risk – undone and open to the world, beyond power.
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