Isn’t a dandelion clock, a perfect, timeless form? Inherently sculptural, distinctly present, yet temporal, ephemeral, within and beyond reach and time.
It has returned to mind often these days, as I have looked to it, in domesticity, suspended. Its familiar, perfectly preserved presence has become increasingly resonant, a still life.
Because, isn’t it in moments of significance, like this, as it is in grief perhaps, that the weight or the presence of something changes shape? In this instance, for me, it has become about the shape and nature of time.
To keep everything in balance, in place, to be resilient and to be fragile, has become a recurrent process. To be with time, to keep time strong, but be present to its passing has become a new and greater, shared universal challenge.
A different way of being for me personally has certainly been challenging. I have been resistant, equally stubborn about setting up a home studio. In the beginning, I stopped and started, moved materials to centres and corners of rooms, became still, paced, circled and moved the same materials back and forth again.
But in this time, I’ve been reminded too of how much my physicality, my emotions, are part of my work. I move with, I am my work and in these moments of reconnection and acceptance, creativity has re-emerged. It has never mattered where I work, the work emerges in the time and space that best informs it. In this sense, my shape, my self has yielded and expanded, infinitely.
And now, as our freedoms are slowly being restored, I’m immersed wholly in a new body of work at home and out in the studio that has its own distinct energy, that speaks to time, to forms and histories unfurling and re-emerging, to the sensuality of the natural world and to transcendence. Perhaps it is me that is re-emerging too as I learn to move, to dance with the ghost of that dandelion clock.
RS 1 June 2020
