The Grass is Always Greener on the Flipside
The drawings in this series are the actualization of a particular kind of thinking space. Ceilings are meditative by default–an uncluttered expanse best viewed from a position of rest. But this does not mean the ceiling is somehow exempt from having things put upon it. The drawings in The Grass is Always Greener on the Flip Side both tame and exoticize the uncharted architectural spaces that hover above our heads.
A recurrent theme in my work is the imaginative relationship between self and society. We find ourselves shaped by the shifting forms of our society, and in turn our shifting sense of self molds our social surroundings. In the back of my mind, upon contemplating the human capacity to appropriate and reinvent, is the children’s book The Borrowers by Mary Norton, in which a family of tiny people make their homes in sundry objects gleaned from “normal” sized humans. What fuelled Norton as a storyteller was the recollection of her own imaginative childhood play, in which she would project microcosmic societies onto miniature spaces usually overlooked.
It is in this tradition that I have populated the uninhabitable. And it is precisely this uninhabitable quality that lends a melancholy to these images. Just as the green grass glimpsed from the opposite side of the fence can never be tangibly experienced, neither can the formations in these drawings. This is a familiar barrier in art, but one ultimately not to be lamented. It is precisely the mutability of these representations that makes them inspiring–they are infinitely reimaginable.