Painting is an open space where anything can happen—at least for me. It’s a kind of serious play, allowing the painting process and materials to help guide how a work comes to a resolution. It’s a cooperation of sorts.
Every decision is in fact, intentional, such as leaving some things as they are when an “accident” happens. In any case, it’s a reaction to the physics of painting materials, the formal language of my painting, and how they come together on the canvas. I’m always searching for a kind of honesty and a direct expression of ideas. It seems like it’s the best way forward—in an overly complicated, conflict-filled world, where language and data are so often weaponized—that we as artists can move.
In the last two years in my sketchbooks, and on scraps of paper, caterpillar images and similar forms kept appearing. At first I painted them, but then pushed them aside as something peripheral. I was still thinking about the idea of “Earth Beings,” entities that live alongside us yet are easy to dismiss. The metaphor of a caterpillar is loaded—it’s pre-cocoon, pre-butterfly, more a symbol of evolution and transformation in a time when, politically, many positions push against any idea of transformation—of being, ideas, or questioning in general. We are, myself included, very human-centric, sometimes denying other animals respect or reverence.
This past year, I came full circle and painted a large work of one of these caterpillars ascending into the sky. After finishing it, I had complicated feelings. Maybe it was naive?
As a child, I often felt that animals were somehow sacred and moved to another plane of existence. It was either an intuition or, at best, a hopeful perspective, since I held these things in a position of wonder.
I don’t remember asking my parents, but I’m sure—like so many kids—I wondered if all animals go to heaven. It’s an anthropomorphic belief system, making animals like humans, considering nature as equal beings who might also be entitled to a place in the over-yonder.
The title of the work, and exhibition, Mum, Do Caterpillars Go to Heaven? has a series of presuppositions. It says there is a heaven. It says my mother should know. It asks if all beings have the option if to go to a better place.The irony of such a question is that it is being asked in a time of great cynicism and contempt for any kind of innocence like this.
If you zoom out, one might ecologically consider if any earth being will be getting to any kind of “heaven” when, inversely, we are living in a kind of hellish post natural world.