'Weaving Ourselves Together', Art and Life series Print

. Weaving Ourselves Together The visual in image or 'live', may capture me, hold me, spur me to make artwork. This is the case with these baskets. Suddenly everywhere I look, images of baskets, and the real thing! My attention is focused! Do a Google images search of 'weaving baskets art'. Look at books on indigenous and ethnic baskets and basic methods of basket making. Find an exhibition in a gallery or museum! Baskets are visually and mentally fascinating to me, organic or not, a multitude of sizes, forms, styles, neat or wayward, colourful or not, tactile, somehow they are deeply embedded in my psyche, and arising and exploding into my consciousness. I have to explore and discover why… The best art exploration is to work towards presenting a fully conceived proposal for exhibition. Running with initial inspiration, regardless of practicalities, I draw, do exploratory making, and integrate words towards the final statement of the work. What is it 'about', what is fundamental? What is at the bottom of the compulsion of the image? Whatever is personal in the making is kept as 'mine', and whatever is contained in the work that will have collective meaning is available to all who view and ponder, for themselves. Ultimately art is a personal (developmental) experience for the maker and the viewer, shared in the company of others. We are talking here of notions of abstracted human form, container, vessel, weaving, variety of materials and their deeper meanings, symbol and metaphor. We are 'Weaving the Parts of Ourselves Together'; our personal opposites of personality that forever jostle for expression, our life histories that need acknowledgement and contained acceptance, our ancestral histories that need to be woven in and absorbed into the fabric of 'me' in the 'here and now', all taken and made into one whole. The chosen materials, form, size, style, making process, can all shed light on personal meaning. This print is of my original exhibition proposal of 2017, and is drawing and digital collage. I am revisiting selected work to reconsider its expression and meaning then and now.