The Interval For Observing Silence

Each piece continues my exploration of the body as a psychological and material threshold, but the doubling or tripling of the head introduces a new register of multiplicity with an embodiment of fractured consciousness. This multiplicity reflects a mind in motion and unable to stabilize into a single self.

The mineral and organic textures embedded in the clothing connect it back to the material language of my other artworks, where the geological meets the human, the surface of paint behaving like sediment, skin, or soil. The forms like the crystalline emerging from the head suggest metamorphosis, or a consciousness in the process of splitting and reforming, at a threshold between human and earth.

There is also a deliberate eeriness here. Art should not resist the eerie; it should enter that realm courageously because the uncanny often opens access to psychological truths that comfort cannot reach. This painting inhabits that in-between space: between the human and the otherworldly, the living and the geological, and stands for the premise that even unease can be a form of revelation.

Intermission No. 45

Built from a cracked and three-dimensional surface, the painting recalls parched soil, fractured stone, or a scarred surface, at once both resilient and vulnerable.

Clay here is not metaphor alone but structure, grounding the work in deep histories of myth and science. Across cultures, clay has been imagined as the origin of human life, and contemporary hypotheses suggest that life itself may have emerged on its mineral surfaces. By incorporating clay directly into the canvas, the painting becomes a site where those ancient and scientific narratives converge.

The surface, shifting between glossy mineral shine and brittle earthen matte, embodies the tension between decay and renewal, fragility and endurance. In this way, the painting is not a static image but an “art-being”: a body of earth that carries memory, radiates vitality, and insists on the blurred boundary between the living and the nonliving.

Disarticulated Subjectivity and Embodiment Revised

Embodiment Revised, 24” x 18”, oil and acrylic on paper and canvas, 2025

These two works interrogate the instability of representation by staging the body as both a site of figuration and a field of material rupture. The seated figure is of a woman, but the face and chest collapse into painterly accretions of opaque, geological textures. In this gesture, the conventions of portraiture are destabilized, reorienting the body toward a condition of fragmentation rather than wholeness.

The insertion of layered, mineral-like surfaces interrupts the continuity of skin and facial recognition, producing a visual language of erosion, stratification, and repair. Her folded hands suggest repose, but their calmness is unsettled by the instability of the head and torso where subjectivity traditionally resides. Here, those loci of identity are obscured, dispersed into sedimentary abstraction.

Positioned within my related exploration of “art-beings,” these works emphasize how subjectivity can be read as a layered archive rather than a singular presence. By collapsing figural representation with material intrusions, the paintings underscore the tension between embodiment and disintegration, presence and absence, the human and the geological.

The title Disarticulated Subjectivity reflects the way this figure resists coherence. The body is present, yet fractured at the very sites where identity is usually anchored, in the chest and the face. In this disruption, subjectivity is not erased but unsettled, dispersed into layers of material and memory, leaving the figure suspended in a liminal psychological space.

Embodiment Revised suggests a body that is present but unsettled, caught in the act of being rewritten. Recognizable in gesture yet fractured at the chest and face, the figure reveals embodiment as provisional, unstable, and open to disruption.

Detail (Disarticulated Subjectivity)

Detail (Disarticulated Subjectivity)

Detail (Embodiment Revised)

Body System II

A female torso, cropped and fragmented, bears an abdominal cavity that evokes both wound and womb, an opening that is at once vulnerable and generative.

Within this recess, the presence of a handmade butterfly transforms the site into a chamber of metamorphosis. The pearlescent paint within carries associations of fertility, and this interplay between anatomy and material suggests the possibility of reproduction, gestation, or the spark of life, yet it remains suspended between biological reference and symbolic ambiguity.

In relation to the earlier Body System I, which emphasized the merging of body and canvas, this work extends the inquiry into questions of reproduction, destruction, and the continuity of life. The butterfly (fragile, ephemeral, yet enduring as a symbol of transformation) emerges from the concavity as if life itself could be conceived within the painted body.

Body System II underscores the paradox of the body as both archive and future: a vessel that bears scars of rupture while also carrying the latent potential for renewal.

Detail from an angle

Detail