The Situation

Modern society is an Information Society. In most of its complex aspects, information about our world far surpasses the experience of our world. We perceive rationally, we compare, we categorize.

The Artist

I work to bypass such filtering; I reject the detached perspective that tends to come with categorization; I favour the dominance of content over form, of narrative over style.

My work builds on two qualities: the haptic, and the conceptual. The conceptual dimension focusses on questions of self and other, on the nature of art and how art relates to other facets of life. But it is the haptic dimension that provides the key to these questions. It accesses them through direct experience, rather than through theoretical discourse. My fictitious characters use art as a private method to cope with their condition. Presenting their activities may include an element of theatrical deception, a fictional construct may be experienced as historic fact before the complete scope of the work is revealed.

The Artwork

The haptic conceptual work can be read on several levels. It starts from an experience that is designed to be moving and meaningful. It continues to a reflection on that experience. It may add participants' contributions to its narrative. It then leads to an open ended conversation. As layer upon layer of reflection is added, the work grows. Therefore the work is not strictly bounded in time, in space, by medium or author.

The work starts out as a localized experience, it transforms into a paradigm of the possible. When it is read as a paradigm, the haptic conceptual piece expands the repertoire of interpretations that we employ to understand the world. As the interpretation is informed by art, and applied to reality, the boundary between the two domains becomes permeable.

The Participant

Access through experience requires participation. The haptic conceptual work has participants, not audience. As participants experience the work, their perception changes. Experienced emotion can then be applied to the world around us. It allows us to ask: where else do we find what we have just gone through? What goes on behind these curtains? What lies behind those objects? Where does such behaviour come from?

Participants may begin to recognize artistic qualities they would have overlooked before. In this moment of new awareness, new art is created.