Creating work that manifests the undulation of time through layers has been primary to my practice for years. My earlier work was inspired by geological strata with layers built up by scumbling and impasto. Then I became interested in the origins of writing and archeology and the thick topography of my paintings became chatty. Entrails from old typewriters, watches and adding machines, as well as tiny animal bones began to appear among the layers of paint like palimpsestual mantles of midden.
A salient allegory for the impulse of this shift is the true story of a tsunami survivor who was swept up in a wall of water along with his entire village and carried far inland until the debris deposited into a wash of silt that read, in my imagination, like an ancient tablet of sacred, indecipherable text.
In recent years, the impasto has completely disappeared and the layers have liquified. Metaphorically, earth has succumbed to the sea. Instead of an aerial view of the traces of time, I am now looking at the scattered fragments from underneath, through water. Thoroughly submerged, the tracings of old machine parts that I have sifted into a kind of asemic alphabet and read like floating debris are starting to push past being palimpsestual to a paradoxical dissolution where shape and spacial relationships are thrown into the blender, submitting to the deluge, so that one loses their footing entirely and has to look for a suspended period of time before they locate where they are.
Throughout the evolution of my work, I’ve repeatedly returned to trying to feel, envision and interact with a sense of time that is utterly indifferent to me in which it’s possible for the past, present and future to collapse into a single breath, and it’s credible to say that we are all eachother in our reckoning with a gestalt far greater than ourselves.
It’s what Gregory Bateson called “the meta-pattern”. He also said, “the map is not the territory”. Yet we keep drawing them, over and over and over.