Artist’s Statement
I am standing in the pond up to my knees. I could start by describing clear shallow water; sunlight creating patterns across the sandy bottom. Water plants moving slowly; catching light. For a while I thought this was the point.
I am trying to deconstruct, or reconstruct, this experience of looking. A pond is both surface and depth. As Merleau-Ponty said in talking about how we see two things, “The enigma though, lies in their bond, in what is between them. “ * It is difficult to see the water itself; the distance that unites the surface and the bottom of the pond.
In the last three series, Pond on Wheels, Standing in Water, and Possibly Now, nature seems to move a foot forward and protrude into the viewer’s space; no longer a vista but the very place where our human bodies meet the natural world.
To touch on the idea of beauty; it is important to me that there is beauty in the
work. Yo-Yo Ma describes the perception of beauty as “a transfer of life”.** I hope for that.
*Extract from ‘Eye and Mind’ (1960). Trans Carleton Dallery, in Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1964) 179-82
** Yo-Yo Ma interview with Krista Tippett on her NPR program, On Being, July 5, 2018