Worthing Monument
The title of this painting refers, I think, to the kind of municipal statue one might find in a seaside town. Due to their didactic clarity these pieces inhabit a realm that is on the cusp of actually being art. When my children were very young we spent a lot of time on beaches and I would often find myself a few yards behind them and their mother. I was often looking on soaking up the poetry of the scene unfolding outside of the linear thrust of life as an adult. Gaston Bachelard talks about poetry as the metaphysics of the moment – a gap where a personal epiphany “dissolves the continuity of sequential time”. The beach with the tide out has this sense of simultaneity where “the most scattered and disunited being achieves unity”. I enjoy the paradox of seeing my family as a statue, which as a prosaic object is the opposite of the process of vertical time. In this respect it works by yoking together the opposites of the male institutional absurd and feminine ineffable epiphany. My paintings try to manifest this intuition of the androgynous instant.