Splitting the Apple 1998 Materials:  mixed media on paper                          Dimensions: 90” X 42” (7.5 ft. tall, 3.5 ft. wide) “Splitting the Apple” refers to opening up something that is natural, looking inside, and irrevocably changing it by doing so. We can’t really split ourselves open, or cleave the seed of our origin. But we can go deeply inside to see what we experience. In that darkness, there could be disease, loss, infinite possibility, invasion, emptiness, death, love, oneness… Having entered into the world, we split it open. Is it violence or revelation? To begin these pieces, I mapped brain action, drawing with both hands around the periphery of the pieces. I wanted to be able to see the structure of thought, and wondered about thought as an active frame. The interior, with poured ink, reflects the feeling of the body as an empty space. The pieces then developed as a conversation between thought as structure and the body as space. I began to wonder if this is where life happens—somewhere between consciousness and emptiness.