When everything crumbles, that’s when the essence of things appears. For years, I had ignored my urge to create and treated it as an eccentricity. But the sudden chaos in my world, made that yearning an unavoidable necessity. Maybe it’s a way of making sense of it all, I don’t know. But that’s what I did: Painting, frantically. And for a long while, that’s just pretty much all I did, all the time. Things started quieting down once it became clear to me, looking at the hundreds of works I had literally spat out, in varied styles and techniques, that a recurrent theme was present. Progressively, but every time more assertively, borders, limits, distinctions were appearing on the canvas. I was drawing boundaries. Maybe it had to do with having lived in four different countries, each for almost as long. Maybe it had to do with being brought up by various surrogates. Maybe it had to do with an intense career where means, end, and anything in between where one and the same: money. Or maybe it had to do with yet another breakup and being single, with no kids, at 45. Maybe all, maybe none. But I was calling out Boundaries, because I had none. To find me.
The boundary is both distinction and belonging: it allows a form to ex-ist (stand out), but only because it is contrasted to the background it is linked to. Paradoxically, it separates and unites at the same time. The difference is the meaning, in and unto itself. A bit like language, where meaning is derived by contrasting elements rather than by referencing an ‘external reality’. Only in my work, the opposition is not Cartesian: Plain can echo stained, ripped can echo straight, teared can echo uninjured- or not. That’s just the Grammar I use to create a network of differences, and it changes in each work. But it is never binary and I think it reflects my distrust for Manichean thinking. There is also the question of perspective, because which side you choose to call ‘form’ and ‘background’ once you have drawn the boundary is completely arbitrary, and on some of the works, the un-painted, the ‘in-between’, stands out relative to the painted itself. So you can’t really differentiate between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ boundaries in the classical sense, and that I feel is relevant to self-perception in relation to the outside world.
I never know how I am going to start, but putting down the first boundary feels the hardest, a bit like in real life. Sometimes it will be rope, literally a physical anchor which reassures me because of its sturdiness and reliability. Sometimes it will be inversely teared triangles. I don’t think it really matters because once you have a starting point, an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, the work can really start. And that is building ‘differences’, a grammar of contrasts that brings cohesion, meaning. Practically, it is solving problems. Of course, every time you solve one, a new set opens up, but I don’t think about that. I just go one step at a time. I remember I once spent a week on the periphery of a canvas, on a little square, interchanging material, form and colour, only to realize a thin black diagonal was the solution. The joy you feel in these moments is just incomparable to anything I’ve known.
A large part of the work is also about not doing things out of frustration because that can become overwhelming. So sometimes I’ll go on ripping painted paper or tape for weeks with no use, yet I’ll collect a portion because they possess a commonality I could use one day, or not. I don’t know in advance. I think it’s about trusting that movement, as well as stillness, is the process, the end in itself. Somehow, it’s a bit like trusting that my language of boundaries, is myself.