MAGIC

Magic

I grew up with many layers of meaning around me. Talismen, votive offerings, religion and icons...old spells and traditions....cures, exorcisms, mystery. What do young people have today? Where is the complexity and the depth/layers that makes us frame our lives in different ways, helps us to look for answers in different places? Has the internet replaced those things too? 

When I was growing up, if I had a question, one of many people that would be on hand to answer it ( as long as I was prepared to ask it of course). I am not objecting to the huge knowledge base at our disposal; it is just that it feels as if young people have one great big impersonal place to look. It seems to me that the internet has demystified things a little too much.  What need is there for passing on information, when everything can be found on line?

This series of works attempts to look beyond the surface at the complexity of cultural transmission. I wanted to capture something of the complexity of the things that move and mystify me. Not all the work immediately answers that brief; work skirts around, sometimes misses, regresses, fails. The glorious failures sometimes have within them a tiny seed of something new. Here is today's work.

'Golum' Digital print on lace paper. 

Inspitred by a visit to Prague.

'Incantation'. (Quote from a papyrous spell in a collection at the British Museum) Pencil/collage/natural substances on cotton rag paper.

'Healing' Drawing and natural substances/cinammon cotton rag paper.

Inspired by the wonderful phoytographs of teh San people in Jurgen Schadeberg's 1959 work 'The San of the Kalahari'.

From a photograph of a San woman, from the same  beautiful book.

The four images together.  I am really enjoying the cotton rag paper.  It makes you use materials in a very different way. It has a natural quality and the way it interacts with natural materials such as tea, coffee, chalk and graphite is very beautiful. You really feel like you do not want to stifle it with too much surface paint, or synthetic materials such as acrylics.