‘Sweet Nothing’
Oil on canvas
‘Sweet Nothing’
Oil on canvas
“Just like the other figures…they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned”
“Everything was being mixed up and all was falling…I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to anther till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you”
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Ma is a Japanese word which can roughly be translated as ‘gap’ or ‘space’. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non form deriving from an intensification of vision.
Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. Therefore ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval
It is ‘the pure, and indeed essential, void between all “things”’
I’m really interested in this kind of non place between states, and its relationship with the temporary intensity of moments/states/emotions that are fleeting and burning away – those which cannot be held on to
I want to explore the place between being and not being, presence and absence, complete closeness and complete solitude
Transience and ‘Ma’
An ‘afterimage’ or ‘ghost image’ is a visual illusion in which retinal impressions persist after the removal of a stimulus
"In fireworks are released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. The inflammable desires, dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness, are ignited at night by the libertarian matches of sleep, and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary relief"
- Fireworks - Kenneth Anger, 1947
"And they forgot to love - but Erik was aware of the fire that eats his heart, while the clock ticks at night. The shortage of time, the repetitive movements of desire, the energy of the body watched by death. Flowers larger than life, dreams larger than life. Nightmares of beauty"
- Marlene Dumas on Erik Andriesse in ‘Nightmares of Beauty’
‘Intimate Strangers II’
Oil on Board
‘Intimate Strangers I’
Oil on Board
"It has captured an important element of humanity which is transcendent: a need to connect"
- On Nan Goldin in ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’
Oil on book cover
"It is an ‘analytic construction’, or fantasy, which tries to cover the moment of separation between before and after, whilst still containing both: a mythical moment of disjunction"
- Formulations of Fantasy - Victor Burgin, James Donald, Cora Kaplan
