The view from a moving train is different from that on a platform, although the two viewers may be within meters of each other. The experience is different in so many more ways than vantage point.
The noise, the speed, the shaking, the momentum, the humidity, the voices of fellow passengers, the smell, the temperature, the path traveled prior to that point, swamp the experience of the train traveler. Glancing at the person on the platform, how can we begin to see through their eyes?
Cultural clashes are like that. but this relativism is a truth for all humans. Even those who share the same culture, the same house, the same family, have starkly different experiences. We are each on our own train and our views are peculiar to our own experiences.
But we crave understanding. We need it for our survival. As social beings we collaborate to solve problems that confront us all. Wherever we are born and whatever language we speak there is a field of inherent questions that arises as a natural outcome of life.
What are we?
What should we do?
What of birth and death?
And no matter the diverse social constructs that form our reality, the answers from one lone traveler can always intrigue and be of use to another.
This is the spore that art can carry. At the same time that we are never able to truly empathize with another human being, we can share at a deep level around the absolute pillars of existence that are not socially determined: We are born. We may love. We will die.
At a time that even gravity is not a constant, our shared biological and neurological truths are common and infinitely unchanging.
The amazing text in this post is by
Will Stubbs and is from his essay, "art of the artless" about the artist
Nyapanyapa Yunupingu in the book
Marking The Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, catalogue for the exhibition curated by
Henry F Skerritt.
The images are of my new piece,
Noble Tenderness, a different perspective of my Awakened Heart. I packed it up gently and brought it to Toronto last week to deliver to Karen from
Guildworks gallery, Prince Edward County Ontario.
There is also an image of a walk in the park near where my grand children live in the city.
