The significance of borrowed things is co-opted for the ritual but their promise of comfort is lost.
The decoration, the encrustation with material is part of the process of objectification - making the image an object in itself and distancing it from myself. In its three-dimensionality it forces itself on the viewer not as a window onto the thing but as the thing itself.
By including objects in or on the image I draw their stories together into new configurations. They become actors on my stage, characters in a new story quite beyond their original existence. For example, if a child's shoe is used to represent a figure, we can identify with it either as the shoe or as the character of the child and by this means are able to become the shoe - We are able to become either the childness of the shoe or the shoe-ness of the child whilst being held in our place by the objects that surround it.
This identification with the object is as central to the reading of the image as it is central to our lives: we are as circumscribed by our possessions as the function of the tool defines its shape. We adopt a role in our own story that fits our chosen parameters and declare it our identity. We understand that we were born to it, that there could be no other, but it is merely a convenient adoption to help the story along. By changing the rules, by changing our objective surroundings we affect the image of our story and thus we can reinvent ourselves.
My images are not so much statements as gateways or escape routes.
If they are flags they are declarations of independence.
Other
texts
Meaning and Nothingness
Tools and the Evolution of Bows
Thomas
Aquinas and
Transubstantiation
Detail from: The Ragged Flag
2007