An interest in the brain, neuroplasticity, wisdom traditions and training to re-wire neural pathways, underlies this work. The desire is to register unadorned, an open, primary experience of time and being. Using household recycling, studio debris, rudimentary drawing and collage, it aims to make present a quiet witnessing of ordinary consciousness. The provisional, piecemeal structures, intend to harness moment by moment unfolding of thought, sensation and feeling and to map awareness as it engages, dwells and passes on; a kind of negotiated looking which slows down and spotlights awareness as it flows. The mind's eye journey.

This attitude is orchestrated by time, chance and choice and the resulting by-product, is the work. These accumulated moments, linked bit by bit, (drawing notations, rubbings, collage, found surfaces, notes one's written to oneself, ) enact a direct transference of real, haphazard everyday things into this open-ended and non-hierarchical document. This might take the form of a map, a diary, a list, a dictionary, structured perhaps, as a stack, a scatter, a string: a sequence, piece by piece.  

The particularity of how something is made and structured, however basic, must concentrate one’s looking on just this bit now. A just is-ness. Each mark needs to have the “now” focus of a fly crawling across a window pane…and yet to question the possibilities, of being able to make connections between systems and meaning, to encounter the dilemmas of signs, through just being aware that we are here, and looking, in real time.

Tricia Gillman

August 2016