Blackness

For me Art is very much about the incarnation of spirit into matter, the souls descent into space and time, into dissolving states of chaos, repressed trauma and dissolution of defences. This descent can be frightening for most people at first, but ultimately It's about going into the unknown blackness, to find your light, the parts of you that remain even as the self structure dissolves.

The blackness represents the shadow self. The shadow deals with all the parts of ourselves that we do not want to look at, that ego rejects. The shadow is the“sum of all personal and collective psychic elements which, because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude, are denied expression in life.”- Jung

Embracing the fact that shadow and light can only exist as concepts relative to each other, is the first step to integrating, and transforming the shadow into alchemical, artistic gold.

As a fairly young species we have found ourselves living in a world predominantly driven by external phenomenon. That is to say we exist in a collective paradigm transfixed on experiences that can be quantified through the narrow funnel of our human senses. Take the allegory of Plato's cave for example, we tend to think of it as a place for the unenlightened, or poor prisoners of darkness and ignorance, where all they can perceive is the shadows, they cant see the light in this case associated with higher states of consciousness, mathematics, geometry and deductive logic. In Western societies we look at these aspects as being the most important, however I'm inclined to disagree because when you are contemplating shadows, the imagination and psyche must come into play and that is perhaps more interesting, as it paints a truer picture.

Ad Reinhardt had a series of black paintings where he talked about how you have to meditate on the blackness to see it become a thousand different things. “Stare into the abyss long enough and eventually you find the abyss stares back at you.”- Niche

In my own inner experience I also discovered the once feared void was actually a space of vigorous creativity as anything can come out of the black. Having spent much time exploring within, I perceived many forms emerging from the gloom, eye witnessed yellow dotted, orange hills develop into an entire world of creative machinery, felt entities kiss me blessings as they passed through me, and experienced some of the most preternatural other-worldly events that have upgraded me forever.

So I'm interested in venturing into the blackness to find sacred sparks of inner truth. As an artist being able to transmute the spiritually rich, transcendental data from these worlds, to visually map visions so that they may be collectively deciphered, is the result of my psyche's descent into darkness.

I believe its this fearless journey that we all must take, which lays the groundwork to discovering the truth of who we really are, and what we aspire to become.