Part of a body of work exploring ideas of Childhood Ontology.
I am fascinated by the way a child’s imagination synthesises the animate and inanimate world around them, aspects of the unfolding phenomena that the world contains, weaving them into a passionately felt personal universe. In this fluid and unfiltered state of perception, devoid of hierarchy and value, the smallest ordinary object can become sacred in a child’s eye. This state of vivid consciousness, of seeing things in their soul’s essence, fascinates me all the more as I feel it is also at the heart of the creative process. An artist has to constantly look at the world with a fresh eye in order to say something true about it.
I think this is what William Blake was intimating in his famous quote
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”