In Practising Our Art, We Touch Our Greatest Fears

Gouache, Ink and Dammar varnish experiments at Huxi Studios

An artistic practice to me often means stepping into a zone where you are faced with your deepest, most intimate and often most uncomfortable aspects of yourself. As you spend days, weeks and months in your studio, the natural wave of rising and falling emotions takes you along a journey of deep reflection, which contain a myriad of mental states: doubt, dullness, momentary elation, profound contentment and dogged perseverance. 

                

In these transitory states, we often meet the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, whether we are sometimes paralysed with fear, overcome with sudden anxiety, or elated with a fragile sense of wonder about what it is we’re doing. In practising our art, we touch our greatest fears and we realise, embody and map the altering and impermanent states that make up our lives as artists and human beings.

The mysterious, enigmatic space around intuition, subconscious and meaning in artwork always perplexes me. There’s always a certain part of an artwork that remains remote to us, there’s always a little left unsaid. Copious tiny messages and implicit meanings transmit themselves through an artwork, which often transcend our consciousness and ability to recognise, interpret and understand. It’s this untouchability, this remoteness, that will always keep part of an artwork alive and unscathed for me, unanalysed, when all its other meanings and associations have become exhausted.

The formless, the meaningless-ness, the beyond-reach-ness, the space, the gap in our comprehension is potent, full of magic.