Week Thirty-Four | Above and Below Ground
I am increasingly aware of where I am as a person and as an artist. In 2021 I made a series of paintings titled ‘Hemispheres’ - I didn’t really know why, I was playing with left/right brain ideas, growing up on one side of the world and now living on the other. I am realising this was one of many prophetic moments in my past as it is the hemispheres of what lies above and below ground that I was searching for. Boneyards. Two major turning points have occurred for me:
Recently reading the Lonesome Dove series - the books aren’t really relevant but the sentence ‘The Earth is a Boneyard but it’s Pretty in the Sunlight’ is a catchy little literary clue in my search for crystallisation. If there are 117 billion skeletons or molecular echoes of skeletons, the Earth really is a boneyard. We just pop up for the briefest of time before we go on back down below. It’s all the molecules, the critters, the fungi, all the goey stuff down there that forms the basis of what I see and experience up here.
First watching Stranger Things on Netflix a couple of years ago. It hit me like a train. It’s possibly a bit low brow. I realised an aesthetic I was chasing in my head was generational, it really wasn’t just me at all. It’s set in 1987 when I would have been a pudding bowl haired 10 year old wearing my brother’s hand-me-down brown cords and riding his too big BMX thunder with my own addition of purple handlebar tassels. Possibly wearing roller skates at the same time or maybe a leotard. I’d have been sent out to play with my ‘lunch’, possibly a tin of hot dogs in brine to share with any other kids I met along the way and instructed not to come back until dinnertime. Apart from my mother’s death when I was five I had a happy childhood - largely because it was before parenting was a verb and we just went off and did whatever we wanted. My kids love ‘80s films because we had so much freedom then, I’m sad my kids don’t have that.
The aesthetic that was significant was firstly the fairy lights that talk - this has been bugging me for years. I see fairy lights as a bit melancholy, mystic and other worldly. So to see exactly that on ST was a bit of a spangle. Secondly the hazy Upside Down looks like all the landscape paintings I have been making all these years but I hadn’t really understood them. So fairy lights, or maybe glow worms, are back. I am not as concerned now I understand them about including them in my work - I thought they might be perceived as cutesy.
