Far Reach

What happens when the bottled up is freed

As of February 25, 2018, I have been a practicer of Transcendental Meditation. I came to the practice because my art was getting darker and darker, reflecting more and more bottled up tragic emotions and stresses within myself. Like magic, I started the practice, and these dark explorations of anxieties and discomfort, rather than being a autobiography of my life, became feelings I empathized to. This release of tension is what my sculpture explores. The center is dense with line-work, and is meant to represent that clutter of negative feelings and emotions which clouded my creativity and outlook on life. Each tendril serves to represent ideas that this practice of meditation has allowed to be loose, affecting my life and my work in positive ways. It was particularly important to capture that loosening feeling with the amount of lines used to indicate the volume of the form, so the middle is meant to be unclear and thick with lines, while the tendril have the clarity meditation provides, their shape is clearly known. The scale was also important factor. Transcendental Meditation, unlike a lot of other forms of meditation, shows its positive effects almost instantly. Within a day of starting, my happiness came back; within a week, stress became foreign. This is represented by the sculpture reaching out at the viewer, with large tendrils that extend far beyond what once was so muddy and thick. It is like an explosion of new life, and so the sculpture’s scale is meant to reflect this. Hanging from the ceiling, the sculpture is not defined by any direction or plane. Ideas, represented by shapes at the end of tendrils, come from any kind of place, whether it be spiritual, earthly, or in the dark recesses of the mind, and so tendrils should not be sitting on anything or limited in any way. This is furthered by “transcending” being a field of consciousness that is unbounded by notions of time or experience.

When viewing this work, the audience is meant to have the sculpture come at their face, showing them its ideas and forms. The transparency of the wire allows for compositions to be made as the viewer looks through the “idea” at the “mind” that produced it. They should be able to instantly see the rapid movement, with tendrils exploding out in all directions. To the keen eye, it may also be noticed the tension in the center, and how it is released as the form moves outward.