Garden of forking paths, 2016 - 2017

Basel 2017
Garden of forking paths

Chemould Prescott Road

Mixed Media
gouache, charcoal, ink and electric wire on handmade paper,
139.7 x 457.2 (cm)
55.0 x 180.0 (inch)
Garden of forking paths is a panoramic landscape wherein fantastical mutations occur within the natural world. Here new hybridized species of birds and animals, trees and flowers, that are otherwise fore-grounded as national symbols get combined, symbolically unifying the politically partitioned countries they represent. In the painting you’ll find conjoined animals and flowers from India/Pakistan, Ireland/UK, Israel/Palestine, North and South Korea, Macedonia/Serbia, Austria/Hungary, US/Mexico or US/Cuba. As if by the defiance of nature in acknowledging the man-made divisions on the ground this paranormal setting appears like a poetic provocation from the past or a proposition for an imagined future when indeed they may reunite. Running across the landscape is the motif of the electrical cable. These conduits of contact that transmit ideas and information, bringing people together, become painstakingly woven entanglements that morph into barbed wires like barriers prodding us to think of the many bonds and borders that make our complex existence.