Curator: Anthony Elms, Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator of the Whitney Biennial, 2014.
What kind of work do you make and what kind of materials do you use? What’s your process?
Though rooted in drawing and painting, my work, nourished by writings, often includes various experimental forms – installations, sculptures, textiles and artist’s books. As sand and rocks are a canvas, a screen or a stage for land art artists, wrapping a whole house with fish net in a laborious work of body against body is for me similar to obsessively accumulating marks on a canvas: the common perception, both outside in the open landscape and inside in the intimate studio, is that of being in a different time and space. My paintings have been described as increments of time and increments of marks and strokes in a meditative moment, where the kind of “glow” time is infinite in both directions, outward in accumulated, immeasurable brush strokes and inward towards a glow point. Music exemplifies it best — retaining previous notes to understand the whole body of music, my painting does something similar — Back in time and forward in time.
What is most exciting about your creative process? Most challenging?
In my process I tap into the beautiful colors of the perpetual dance and rejoicing of the Universe. It is a sacred mantle that I have agreed to in this life time: to be a translator of sacred beauty. My artwork goes each time through a process of transformation and rebirth, there is a wholing emerging from the deep dives that I take.
What inspires you to make your work/what have you been looking at/reading/listening to lately?
Nature, myths, spiritual teachings inspire me, other artists’ work inspires me. I’ve been studying 5D Astrology, reading Carl Jung, Dane Rudhyar, Marc Edmund Jones, Sappho’s poems and looked at works by Emma Kunz, Sigmar Polke, Austin Osman Spare, Hilma af Klint, Henry Michaux to name a few.
How has your practice been impacted by the current health crisis and quarantine? Have you made any work about it yet?
The whole planet is recalibrating, this is the intermediate space. Part of me looks up to see what’s happening and then dives back into the creative process. I am working on a new project encompassing more than 10 years of diaries and recordings of 5D Astrology sessions. The most recent painting I did is “Wells of Infinite Silence”, a pool of sorrow surging from the depths, the Vestals of the temple are the guardians of this stillness, the unbroken dark, the god, true art, the formless before form began.