Stepping through from one side to the other. It can happen without trying. It can happen with an act of curiosity, it can happen with an act of violence. Somehow you find yourself on the other side of the world you thought you lived in. The safe world. The world where people were not trying to kill you. The world where people meant what they said, the world of plenty, the world where people you love the most are alive, or simply the world of convention, in which everything is understandable, quantifiable.
Making art is a way of stepping through from one side to another. Intentionally, so not the other side that happens through violence. The side that happens through curiosity. Curiosity and intention, an intention to step.
It always feels like this to paint, to make something, but it was only for the last exhibition that I actually made the hole in the canvas that people could step through, physically. The other side was ultraviolet. The other side had hanging wires like brain or heart scans. The other side had a portal at the end of it that could have been painted by a child, it was just a blackness. A blackness that swallowed. But it didn’t really matter what was on the other side.
It wasn’t about the discovery it was about the step. That’s what happens also when a painting looks back at you. When you become not the creator but the experience created by the creation.
I’m obviously not primarily talking about painting here – but if we’re going to survive and change these conditions of violence, destruction and absolutely uncontrollable greed in the world, we’re going to have to learn to step.
What does that mean to you?