My work starts with a question I cannot answer, what if physical life is only one part of being alive?

 

    Recently, I have become deeply interested in near-death experiences, especially the strange consistency with which people describe them as feeling, “more real than real”. I research first-person testimonies alongside scientific studies of NDE’s and consciousness but I am less interested in solving the mystery than I am in considering what it asks of us. What does it mean for someone to return to ordinary life convinced that what they experienced beyond it felt somehow more real that the world they came back to? 

 

There is no entrance, 

    There is no exit,

        There is just life, throughout. 

 

    Painting gives me a place to sit with that question without forcing it into an answer. It also provides a place to work when the excitement of these stories overflow without my full comprehension. I am very drawn to the space just before recognition, when something is on the brink of becoming several things at once. A ring as a physical item represents many things, such as unity, value, trust, connection, continuance- or an opening. A landscape can resemble a body, or vice versa. Gold can carry ideas of reverence and permanence while remaining something constructed, or “fools”, even, being a representation of it only. Hidden hierarchies are only noticed by their physical traits, a trained, faithful eye, or simply within someone looking for answers.

    These worlds borrow from recurring ideas within NDE testimonies: light, energy, consciousness, the body, and alternate experiences of space and time. Rather than illustrating an afterlife, I think about reality and “ultra reality” as possibilities. A total dismissal of death.

    I do not expect a painting to prove an afterlife exists. I want to create a small interruption in certainty. Having an understanding of life might not require knowing where it ends. 

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