:: 2010 :: 60cm x 120cm :: Acrylics, Inks and Markers on Canvas ::
This image was based on a fragmented memory of a dream in which I was brandishing a blade and cutting myself - a truly unsettling image and one experienced during the darkest period of summer 2010. I do not tend to get dark very often, and it usually happens during a transformative period, but the challenge here was to turn this personally disturbing yet cathartic image into something transcendent and speaking of the light of life rather than the sorrow of self-destruction. Here I turned again to the work of Riane Eisler, particularly her book 'The Chalice And The Blade', in which the blade represents destructive and hierarchical ways of living and the chalice represents partnership-oriented egalitarian lifeways. The image began to clarify for me: the dream represented the killing off of an old, blade-driven and destructive lifeway within me, and I quickly realised that here was a chance to take on a new chalice-based imprint through the completion of this artwork. Hence the flickering vision, within the figure's radiant eye-beams, of two chalices, as if to say 'I am here in the dark destroying myself, not for the sake of it, but to pursue a brighter lifeway based not on death but upon light and life'. This work was thus the result of a long, painful and challenging process which was also ultimately very positive.
