This arresting painting presents as its subject the most vital of all our organs, the heart. How strange and wonderful to behold the heart as if it were some kind of topographical landscape. We look down upon it as if it were an atoll isolated in the darkest sea. The undulations and ravines of its muscularity seem formed by the earth itself over thousands of years. The work has been made with layers and layers of pigment and gum and then like a exploratory excavation it is sanded and drilled and scraped and sprayed to leave us with an image akin to that of a fossil – its form and function implied and understood but not described in detail. We are drawn into a mysterious and compelling view of the heart that invites us in to contemplate the very essence of life.
Our hearts connect us to the world we live in, keeping us alive and thriving and flourishing with a force and constancy that is not even of our own making. This powerful work reminds us of the hearts magnificent and relentless character, its physicality and its heroic architecture. In doing this there is an unfamiliar perspective shift that something so extraordinary and symbolic might yet be so unfamiliar, so strange and so compelling.