The above text accompanied my exhibition ‘Dogs’ at Lakeside Centre in Thamesmead, London in late July 2024. The installation ‘Axel’ was the culminating point of the exhibition. The central sculpture is a portrait of my younger brother's dog - a happy and smart mongrel, whose chance at a better life had been personally meaningful to me. Axel emanated this joyous and playful curiosity and alertness that I since started to re-discover in art. This required shutting myself away from the art world for a while, making my practice emotionally independent from the dynamics of competition.

 

When walking into the installation, one sees Axel's back, and so we find ourselves in the role of those who follow him into the cave. One can walk around the sculpture, see the details of the clay walls and take various perspectives from behind the muslin hanging freely on the right hand side of the dog. There is soft light falling on the walls and a central light from above Axel.

 

One of the oldest traces of human and canine companionship still exists in the Chauvet cave in France - footsteps of a child and a dog walking alongside, dated at 26 000 years ago. This image is like a dream, it is us - our ancestors, it is this wonder and friendship. How to feel those roots again? For years I have been fascinated by cave paintings. Among others it brings forth the idea that art is in some way essential to our being, it is something that was part of us before we had farms, cars and hospitals. It also asks ‘what is essential for a particular work of art?’ - a specific type of essentialism, an idea that a friend and artist Dani Tagen installed in me (she is also fascinated by cave paintings and even visited Chauvet herself). This essentiallism is about considering carefully what is truly needed for the given work of art, what is unnecessary and beyond that, what the life of this artwork will look like after its first appearance in the world. 

 

The caves appeared again in my correspondence with an ethnographer and sociologist, Professor Monika Kostera, whose book ‘After The Apocalypse. Finding Hope in Organising’ had a great impact on my work in the past few years. Prof. Kostera is now conducting anthropological research on the structure and meaning of artists' work; I have been taking part in this study periodically over the past two years. Below is a fragment of a poem written by Monika Kostera, one she wrote in the summer 2023, while travelling in the south of France and visiting museums with prehistoric artefacts:

 

Take two Stones

Make fire

There will be harsher

gnashing,

a soft smell of thunder,

 

The siliceous calling

every time

hand /touch /stone

 

 

For me, the idea of return to the cave is about return to a deeply sensual life, to adventure and potentially danger - as being together means being open, at a risk of losing one's own will, a return to aliveness. Equally, it is not tracing back the steps, it is making a full circle - as Jeremy Johnson writes in his recent book about Jean Gebser : perhaps we have gone through the teenage individuation stage as a culture, return to our roots might therefore happen in a way similar to a process of a person maturing.

 

And so we follow Axel, as he wonders curiously into the cave, the walls of the cave vibrate with life, just as he does, they are made of the same stuff. The walls are painted with clay from my local forest - Lessness Woods. Beautiful red clay that is visible in the pathways between trees and shrubbery; a great amount of it has been uncovered by digging of a pond in one part of the forest. The plinth is painted with clay from a local school, thanks to a very energetic and inspiring science teacher - Kim Ferran who one day offered it to me as some was dug out in the school's Eco Garden she was organising. Those clays also find their place in the sculptures and in the frames of drawings and paintings in the exhibition. The gesso for the paintings uses clay and chalk from those same woods. It is the stuff of the world that enchanted me and pulled me into itself over the past seven years of living in Thamesmead. I welcome and extend that world.

 

It is in the omnipresent vibration of the clay and the shared material that the monochromatic composition materialises what I've learned during the process of its creation, punctuated by meditation in nature and regular offline periods: the depth of attention towards the surrounding world, material and local, can reveal the natural sense of deep rooted connection with what is truly our home - Earth. This has been said in so many ways, by so many, especially in recent times - from Timothy Morton through Claire Dunn to pope Francis - still, it cannot become banal, as it always relies on experience, on practice: 

 

aliveness

 

a life in a location

 

a life with all the senses. 

 

It carries with it a new sort of peace, togetherness. 

 

Paul Tillich in his book 'The Courage to Be' speaks of the ability to recognise which part of us is more essential than another, and in a situation where they collide, a courage to sacrifice one that is less so. And it has come to me during the course of my work on this project 

 

the essence of art is not in being precise about one's vision, but in being alive within one's environment.

 

 

 

*  *  *

 

 

Something I never want to forget: sitting down and looking at plants growing. Every day. My tentacles, my thin delicate roots reaching out to them. Settling in the world. Sitting down and looking at the sunset, start to finish, a chair in the courtyard, and nothing else pulling me away, just movements of clouds and light over time. A time. Taking a long time to look. I must never forget that time. I must never forget that time when the world opened up to me. It opened up after a long time of tending to it, attending to it. Not through work, but through ceasing to work. 

 

'My leaves sing.

 

I am earth, earth'

 

 

(from A Book of Hours by Thomas Merton)

 

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