This is a reflection on my own situation … and my observation of everything that is happening from the outside. In 2014, in Ukraine, I felt like I wasn’t involved, that I was safe, but that I was somehow deep underwater and couldn’t breathe, and that life, like a boat, floated by on the surface. Here it looks like a bullet or a coffin… and it seems like you could swim up into the light; it is like a vision in a dream!
I would like to invite you to help create a collective film.
During the Coronavirus pandemic I have felt my horizons simultaneously shrink to the size of my neighbourhood, my home, and expand as my thoughts and dreams are filled with events and places far away.
Forest fires, floods, empty streets, streets full of protests, violence, or celebrations, long, socially-distanced lines at polling stations or banks, an iceberg floating in the Antarctic Ocean, and death, daily – all these scenes have been happening before our eyes. The rifts between people seem especially deep right now. Maybe others share a feeling of shrunken and overstretched horizons.
I would like to create a collective, continuous – potentially infinite – landscape film, inspired by the ‘endless landscape’ card game. I want to see what happens when we follow a horizon line. The horizon needn’t be a distant view of hills or sea, or buildings, or sky – your landscape can be your kitchen shelf, the kerb, a leaf or rock. Your interior or internal landscape is perhaps the nearest to hand, the most vivid, the horizon that holds your attention right now.
I started making these small drawings of shelters, and trees, last November, as the trees shed their yellow. They were about inhabitable spaces, in the mind’s eye, and in the drawing. I made them on torn up strips of old life drawings from twenty years ago, that I did not want to throw away, regretting the waste of good quality paper. The images kept on coming, as if wanting to be painted. When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated. Not a direct depiction, but not unrelated to the bleakness. And at the same time they were about a sort of refuge, a waiting or suspension. It’s November again. And the war is relentless, still. And I am still painting shelters.