Ars Longa Vita Brevis

Just taken down the work from the exhibition made with colleagues at school as part of the Waterloo Parcours d' Artistes. It is always delightful to discover that particular works in very different media resonate with related or corresponding themes or concerns and individual internal quiet reflection and contemplation supplemented by critical discussion with students over time helps one to gradually apprehend the initially invisible fine capillary connections, or neurological pathways toward meaning, that the works makes in the mind of the viewer who makes an effort to understand.

So much of this meaning depends on the medium and the context of the space which includes the plinth or the frame as well as the gallery. Michelle Cornez's black burnt out burnt seed pods or hatched egg like structures with their white crackled glazed skins suggest something mysterious that has just been born or just died, an organic or biological life and death cycle that has fused the metamorphoses of earth, air, fire and water into something fixed and permanent enough for us to contemplate.

Marianne Beheaghel's 'Healing' installations of delicately bandaged bone like wooden branches and twigs twinned with their carefully drawn trompe l' oeil mirror image and incubating like religious relics inside a clinical perspex box suggest the power of modern science and medicine to heal a fractured limb as well as the mummification and embalming process of the Egyptian's designed to secure a place for the dead soul in a happy afterlife

My own work both in the elegiac autumnal landscape with it's panoramic horizontal and vertical geometry and long evening shadows suggests the cyclical nature time and the small oil paintings from the fugitive image series are a homage, if you like, to the transience of paper and the image itself, which ironically is 'frozen' in an artistic form, an illusion of stable unchanging reality created to staunch the inevitability of change yet subject to the same three marks of existence, 'anicca', 'anatta', 'dukkha'.