a statement of thinking


A ‘poly-tekhne-kian’ and academic at Goldsmiths, University of London, I began in the sphere of performance research, which organically evolved into concerns with composition of photographic, cinematic, and eventually digital image, in relation to ontology. I prefer to use the term ‘poly-tekhne-kian’, rather than ‘artist’, to describe my practice as ‘tekhne’ has a sense of practice that is of more than art, one that incorporates philosophy, science, and what one refers to today as ‘technology’. I have a non-dichotomised sense of the world where body is not in contra-distinction to space; mind is not in contra-distinction to body; the human being is not in contra-distinction to nature; material is not in contra-distinction to ‘spiritual’; and where there is not an apprehension of or alienation from technology, nor one which sees technology as inherently dissimilar to nature. Such polymorphous thinking contextualises specific objectives of each project undertaken.

Tantric art reached maturation in South Asia around fifth century C.E., manifesting in an integrated practice of dependent origination of architecture-art-body-health-nature-philosophy-technology, epitomised by rock cut edifices at Ellora.. The architecture of these edifices, including the surrounding voided space, comes into being only through cognisant beings' performative kinaesthetics. I am interrogating relevances of such notions in contemporary post-human space-time, with particular consideration of spectatorship, montage and relational.

One may associates certain notions of metaphysical space-time in Asia with contemporary notions of virtual space. Moreover, such a synthetic approach to form-theme relates to text: For pages of madness, I contemplated images that were both typographic and pictorial - correlating with calligraphy, and concrete poetry - engendering trans-media poetry; operating in the manner of ciné-roman artists who made films to read.

Tantric, Buddhist, and animist notions consider each phenomenon as sacred. My practice is concerned with an art that may manifest in an every day, including construction of ‘gardens’ and of furniture that comes into being though the manipulation of others: a ‘scenography of the home’.

Maturana and Varela see cognition as a bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself. A practice that I aspire to generate could be considered to manifest and exist 'between forms, between bodies, between spectators and artists, between symbolic and physical environments, environments that are constantly in flux'. On can speculate that a notion of mind exists in such interstitial realms; and of a painterly practice, not as paradigmatic of thinking, but a painterly practice as thinking.