What Is It To Belong? is another work that embraces dramatic strategies that I’ve played with in a series of smaller oil works titled, Dark Hope, and my ongoing fascination with the properties of geometric structures. The matrix of circles has been drawn with a compass, but swiflty painted by hand using brushes of different sizes, giving a looser rhythm and feel to the overall pattern and some of the phenomena where the circles intersect.

I seem to continually rotate around structures that help define and categorize things, relations, beings and concepts while simultaneously feeling trapped within them. I’ve also replayed a representation of a “broken sunset” that abstractly functions as a horizon and engulfs the suggested space of a fenced-in garden. The fence is rendered by projecting a photograph and aligning the semicircular motifs to the regular matrix of circles, where it becomes evident that the designer of the decorative elements likely used a similar matrix – the alignment is remarkable.

The work carries, for me, so many complicated feelings I have regarding forms-of-life, the use of borders and structures, and how these things relate to beauty or the conditions of belonging.