The art object for me, holds, as do many human endeavours, the potential to embody all that is best and meaningful in us and in doing so attempt to resolve the tensions between our need to embrace both the immediate and the infinite. Our vision of matters beyond the immediate can be captured and expressed in the concept of an artwork, the sensual immediacies of our existence can also be expressed and celebrated within the making of the art object. Each stroke of the brush, each chip of material removed reflecting back our individuality and the moment in time when it happened, while at the same time, connecting us to the sensuality, immediacy and physicality of our world and our humanity.
Although in our minds we may imagine so, in reality no individual is an island, we are culturally, gender, family and experience specific, paradoxically needing all these things to plot the course of our own individuality and uniqueness. We exist within and most importantly, I suspect, cannot exist without human society. Thus we are connected into a human loop where our own individuality and particularity is informed by and reflected back by the generalities of our society and its culture. Pondering this dilemma, it has occurred to me that our individual art then to be art at all, must; among other things, run the gauntlet of the general, of the ‘public’ because it is in sharing it that it is made art, it is in placing it before others and co-opting them into the creative process, that the art making process is completed and consummated. Nothing in life is a closed system, art to be art at all should, I believe, live equally within our own individuality and our community and must, in the end, attempt to balance on the knife edge of expressing both fully.