This week I’m circling back to a video I made last year which was the prompt for my starting to write here on Substack.
In September, 2024, I got hold of a print copy of the latest version of Unpsychology magazine. I had published some images in an earlier edition, so had been receiving the magazine by email, but I’d been put off regularly reading by the fact that it was online. It was so nice to hold a physical copy in my hands, this time on the theme of ‘Edges’; to be able to flick through, to see art-work spreading over the pages on paper that I could feel.
I hadn’t been writing regularly for years (blog here). I was disillusioned with social media, still in some degree of retreat after the pandemic, and actually badly in need of social and artistic regeneration, though I didn’t realise it.
As I was reading through the poems and stories in the magazine, I began to notice a recurring theme of complexity, emergence, and unpredictability, which stirred up memories of my ten or so intense years of research and writing in this area. Sometime around 2008, in yet another lurch of re-invention, I had consigned all of that to the rubbish heap of ‘things I’ve moved on from’, intending never to look back. But that’s the thing about complexity theory (dynamic systems theory, complex adaptive systems theory). It’s so deep, so provisional, with so much inbuilt space for the unknown, for the radical unknowability of the world, that I can never completely give it up. I decided to look at all my paintings over the last 15 years through a complexity lens, to see if any of what I had been doing might reflect those ideas that had captivated me for so long. This video is what I found.
The text on the last image is Rainer Maria Rilke:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Deep thanks to Steve Thorp and Julia Macintosh at Unpsychology Voices for sharing my video, which made me set up an account on Substack and got me writing again!
