Oracle: Maquette 2

Studies: graphite on paper, 316 x 237 mm. From the maquette

Not everything has to have a reason. As I work, an internal dialogue continually debates, interrogates, plays the devil’s advocate: what is this for, is this more effective, where will you go from here? At times I need to cover my ears from these voices that stop me from travelling to, I do not know where. The place does not matter in the doing, but here lies the rub, how do I mark the path by which I have sleep-walked to this clearing in the fog of work? Experience follows me on the trail to a new place, it is she that leaves the marks on the walls of the maze I have wandered into. The journey made familiar, I can follow my way back without minding the why. I need to find my way back, because I cannot stay where I am and sometime I might want to return.

Not everything has to have a reason. Only on the return journey might I encounter the why of something I did. Moments after, or years, unencumbered by thoughts of purpose, ideas that once were awkward come together and show me a different place, the significance of peculiar details. Details in a myth built from once cloven thoughts rejoined. These maquettes are such confections, wrought to be returned to dust, their image grasped with camera and pencil as they dry and crack and crumble before me, they become the memory that builds the life of the idea. Accreting to one another their weight is felt inside me, and the work is done under their gravity, reflection having been done so that feeling and understanding cause the motion and my mind moves to the next place I do not know where or for what reason.