About

HEART OF THE MATTER/MATTERS OF THE HEART

“Keep your heart in your body,” a renowned Tai Chi master advised when asked how to maneuver the often overwhelming challenges of everyday life.

When I heard this, and to this day, I picture my actual heart, the organ that keeps us alive, stranded and jumping around on the gritty asphalt of a city street. How can I manage to get it safely back into my chest, and what does it mean?

Perhaps the metaphor for the heart is compassion, and the image of the abandoned heart is a necessary reminder of how vulnerable we are to losing our sense of belonging. Especially now, when pandemic fears and political and civil unrest divide us, it is nearly impossible to look inward and to remember that kindness towards others is life-giving to ourselves.

MRI imaging is a way to literally look inward. I have recently acquired images of my spine and my skull. I find them fascinating, and almost magical, in that they see the unseen. They, too, represent metaphors for an inner self, often forgotten in the stress and routines of day-to-day living. Especially as artists, we hear a lot about right brain vs. left brain — creativity vs. logic.

I prefer to think of it as a balance, a synesthesia-like mixture and cross-over of feeling and thinking. Interestingly, heart and mind are the same word, Xin, in Chinese.

These works represent my attraction to the textures of materials and the texture of life as seen through the lens of representations of the heart, mind and other images and objects that catch my eye.