Saturday 11 June 2016

darkness and light





'One of the phenomena that I've worked with over many years is darkness. Darkness is a fact that we all know about, an idea about the absence of light. Very simple. What interests me however is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness that I can generate, let's say a block of stone with a cavity in it can have a darkness, is resident in you already; that you know already. This is not a verbal connection, but a bodily one. That's why sculpture occupies the same space as your body,





One of my preoccupations is the actual and necessary coexistence of light with darkness. I lived with an overwhelming sense of darkness for a long time. Injustice, suffering, inequality, cruelty, greed. Unconscious of this, I unconsciously sought out something that could counter these things. There was no sense that they were ever going to go away, but, like a slime mould moving away from a threat to its existence, I groped for something else. 







I'm surrounded by sensitive people who are fighting for justice. Angry, furious, inflamed to action. I've done a lot of that, I fought my various causes for decades. Now I fight for joy. The darkness is everywhere, and now one of my jobs is to make light. Not in denial of darkness, but as a tool for managing it.












It's easy to forget joy. Or to feel that joy is not permitted for as long as there's such terrible suffering in the world; perhaps also to feel that the only viable role for art is to bring that suffering to people's attention.

Something that helped me see this differently was a film called  Amandla:


'Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is a 2002 documentary film depicting the struggles of black South Africans against the injustices of Apartheid through the use of music. The film takes its name from the Zulu and Xhosa word amandla, which means power.'















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