Balancing Acts
Balancing Acts 1997 Materials: mixed media on rice paper Dimensions: 90″X40″ (7.5 ft. tall, 3.3 ft. wide) What is it to be human? I have an orange shoulder, a big blue square in my middle, my memory is a stone, and I have a man in my head. What is this? My heart is on fire, and questions are dissolving my knees. Is this me or is my sensation an invention? I held a question: can we see ourselves? The answer was continually no. In any case, there are layers of bodily experience. I attempted to map those layers, which could be named variously: physical, spiritual, emotional, energetic, etc. But in the naming, the experience would be lost. The attempt here was to simply map the experience without naming. These characters are environments in and of themselves. A person is a universe—multidimensional, ever changing. These people emerged as saints of the every day sort: like so many ordinary people who die in obscurity with their silent record of private suffering and unnoticed saintly acts. The rice paper is ephemeral, as we are. The pastels are just colored dust. This is all dust on paper. Drawing is an ancient language, the prototype for what we recognize as written language, now. To make a mark has meaning, even if the meaning is not known before the mark is made. Drawing is dreaming.