Especially in my own artwork.
The unsaid can be so much more powerful than the explicit.
I think that is why I am so drawn to the minimalist aesthetic. Sometimes I fear it verges on narcissism, how fascinated I become with a rearranging a few simple objects, that are highly charged with meaning.
I used block print stamps of a house, a fish a circle and a jug. Thoughts of comfort, shelter, containment, spirituality, fragility, and abundance come to mind as I create little sweet vignettes with these ubiquitous shapes.
Then, with a pencil I traced simple lines and shapes, each of which infuse the relationships between the objects with a whole new archive of narratives. The stories start to arise from the pages and I hear voices, see scenes, taste moods of lives that may have lived in the imagination of these little pictures.
I wrote out a few lines from the unwritten novels that each picture connotes and then, by typing them on an old typewriter, arranging, cutting and pasting them, they are summoned into the visual world where their shape, form and size have value. They play as elements in the collage, able to bounce the characters and histories back and forth in the spaces between shapes.
Any adult or kid could finish the stories, arrange the images and create narratives that resonate in new ways.
I'm sorry. Its all so ambiguous, but I can't help loving this series of unrelated-yet harmonious images.
Like lost pages from the same book, rearranged on my table, and I'm left to imagine the stories that are long gone.
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