containing and enveloping

It’s been a struggle for me to talk about my work. There is so much I want to say. That's the problem – I cannot speak it. The things I want to say cannot be spoken. That’s why I make art. To say the unsayable. To open that hidden and interior part of life, that precious nucleus bound so tightly beneath language and thought. Those best thing that cannot be told.  

There are images everywhere, experiences, whole worlds within worlds. There’s no way to verbalize all that we know and all that we see. A symbol can say so much more than a word alone. Or what about a symbol with a word?  Or what about the symbols embodied in the language itself, its visage and sound? How can I express to you what I see in the world? There is always that distance that Rilke talks about, that un-crossable distance between two people, that distance that enables us to see each other against the blue sky.  How can I give myself to you so that you see as I see?

We may never know each other, not really. But if I make my work and it is authentic to me, and you make your work and it is authentic to you, then we may come to each other and know each other as ones who have lived and journeyed, and in that way we become familiar. 

With everything that I have become, everything I have seen, the places I have been and things I have realized. All my epiphanies. I am a Universe in and of itself. Come into me and see as I see.  That's the universal impulse, I think: to be known. To know. It’s vital and it is intrinsic to human development. I say through visual metaphor what I cannot say through language.  Through image and sound and space and body, I come to myself more fully so I can come to the world whole. I know myself so that I may know you. 

My art is how I find my way through the day.  It’s spontaneous to me, like breath or hunger. I don’t know where it comes from and I seek it every day. It’s how I weave myself through my life, the river I am carried on, to what end I don’t know. It’s inseparable from me and there is no loss like the loss of its voice guiding me. When I don’t hear it, I wait for it. I wait for it breathless and in terror of it never returning to me.