:: 2015 :: 30cm x 42cm :: Inks & Markers on Card ::
When one starts to study the nature of human symbolic culture, it is very easy to lose oneself into the definitions of what do we mean by a symbol, and hence argue about labels - terms of the debate, or what David Lewis-Williams once called a logomachy - rather than human behaviours and beliefs. This is complicated by the fact that the working of human cognition - such as, for example, those which work unconsciously to facilitate and reify symbolic beliefs into symbolic culture - are closed to conscious attention, and hence much theorising upon symbolic culture is hamstrung by exegetical moving around of symbols, rather than piercing to the phenomenological heart of symbolic cognition itself. It is as if we swap one mask for another, constantly, without ever realising that the mask is what we need to look at. This illustration seeks to evoke that strange complexity.
