From the Jetty Series

The jetty is a simple structure, usually wooden in my world, which conjures ideas about how we reach out further away from the solid ground, where the extent of the sea and all its mysteries meet the complexities of mans life on land.

I don’t know who builds jetties, and how they decide where to put them: do the fishermen of a small river town want a place to fiddle and fish at all hours or is it the boat handlers that want to depart and return to this piece of landing connected to the mainland. Maybe it’s the lovers or loners that plan this extension deeper into the water to give them that sense of connection with the mystery and romance of the unknown? Do people vote on its need or position or do some people with craft and initiative just do it and leave the others in the town imagining the whole thing is part of the city planning or a natural order?

The jetty that I sat on to make my drawings was very old, but quite safe, anchored deep in the mud. Many fishing boats had left from and returned to these salted planks and poles.
Standing out there with a light breeze flushing my eyes, the stars overhead, bubbles coming to the surface I want try something new, something that may unexpectedly connect me again with the extraordinary; something that will challenge the commonplace ego pursuits and allow me to enter into the unknown on some sort of equal terms. I want my conscious order to face the excitement of challenges that will dissolve certainty and lift me to the elation of the autochthonous or the immanent spirit and independent movement of spirit in matter.

Time is held between comings and goings, energy is suspended and transformed into new action, adventure or home coming. These are the simplest of places but carrying the greatest contradictions and paradoxes, all essential to life; a place of stillness, a place of motion, reflection and answer, knowing and discovery, nourishment and hunger, reality and dream. There is not excess.

Walking or standing on a jetty always carries a reverence. Culture and craft is extending itself into deeper waters, extending itself into a place of wonder; the place of walking over the water in which an unknown life is teaming with biology and inorganic mystery.

I catch myself questioning the order of all the daytime certainties when I extend myself outwards towards the life giving promise of facing that actual unknown- the mystery of the water teaming with life and movement and promise. It is an obvious relief from the subjectivity of my little life with its needs and aspirations; its relationships and finitude.

Living creatively would be to immerse myself into the unconscious in a sort of dialectic way where the tertium non data suddenly reveals itself in the very creation of symbols itself through some kind of transcendent function – a miracle that transcends the obsession of the ego’s need to construct reality and order.