Switch on then till I see where I’m going 2023 – 50 x 40cm, acrylic on canvas
The title is a pragmatic instruction to illuminate the immediate path without knowing the destination, the light switched on not to see the whole but to see the next step. The departure initiated before the destination is known. The uprooting began before the horizon was visible.
The main flower is not growing. It is leaving.
The mutation is the condition of leaving. This flower is not quite any specific species: it has the peony’s fullness, the rose’s structure, and something else entirely in the gold and green interior visible at the centre of the upper bloom, an internal complexity that belongs to no conventional flower.
In the upper right, a grey-white form where the black field has eroded or torn to reveal the pale sky beyond it — a mountain, or the edge of the darkness, or simply the glimpse of whatever lies beyond the zone the black field represents. The horizon is tiny, partial, barely there. The flower is moving toward it without being able to see it from where it currently is. The switch has been turned on. The immediate path is illuminated. The destination remains at the edge of perception, visible only as a gap in the dark.
The stem crosses every horizontal layer of the canvas in its upward arc, moving toward the partial glimpse of sky without stopping at any of the boundaries that divide the canvas into its managed zones.
Switch on then. The flower moves toward what it can barely see.