Page 95 - Tributaries Catalogue
P. 95
unity needed to sustain life. The submerging, sinking death. The
work captures a profound sense of death-mask feel of the figure
boundary loss, as the waters rise suggests the end of the ego, and
and we float, face to sky, in a body more powerfully a final dousing of
of water. We can no longer look the human fire as we succumb to
downwards in an objectifying and the downward pull of water’s
mastering gaze that egotistically cooling, relaxing peacefulness.
hones-in on a foregrounded item of But, importantly, the figure does
interest. Instead, our vision must not succumb fully to this invitation,
relax upwards, placing our bodies but remains permanently,
under the sky, under the clouds, suspended in a tension between the
under the trees, in a moment of light of the internal fire and the
release, giving way and giving over, surrounding blue depths of the cool
that re-places the ego with the water. It does not lie still. The work
fragile, small, body, rippling represents an eternal becoming, an
outwards in soft boundaryless energetic movement of fiery light
connection with the surrounding and rippling water. The message is
water, the infinite sky above and not that of radical deep-ecology
the abyssal depths below. As our where the best thing a human can
eyes close, the immensity do for the environment is commit
overwhelms and the movement in suicide. Instead, humans need to
this work shifts from the life-giving find out what life wants from us,
relief of healing waters, to water’s and the aphoristic answer has to do
powerful invitation towards a with “becoming water.”
86
