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How does one describe being a person in the world? By what means can subjectivity grasp the fluid phenomena of the world? Relying on abstractions we illuminate what it is to be this person in this world. While metaphor, simile and allusion are always inadequate for subjectively precise communication, they embody shared and separatist tendencies of ‘identity,’ or the ways in which we position ourselves in the world.
Three relatively simple components—cartoons, ornamental furniture and geometric abstraction—exist in the work as both symbol and material. Their historical meanings and formal qualities are made permeable and plastic in my work. None of these components exist in pure form; they are like so much of what constitutes human thinking, distinctions invented to facilitate imagination.
Like the cartoon contours from which I take inspiration, my work illustrates and enacts identity as a shape-shifting inclination, exerting and retreating, belonging and rejecting, and it maintains the tension between such things while avoiding freezing them as dichotomies. Having a capacity to invent simplifications is necessary to face the overwhelming complexity of the world. The fluidity of identity and the world require abstractions to match. Simplifying practices might involve implicating ‘boundary’ or ‘distinction’ as concepts essential to identity. With loose lines my work explores the animation demanded of edges, limits or boundaries.
I employ humour to loosen fixity. Through an intended foolishness, I attempt pre-emptively to force a cognitive siege break in the viewers of my work.
All influences are inadequate on their own but intriguing in that they force a problem of reconciliation. My manipulation of relatively simple fare, from cartoons to the forms of ornamental furniture and the language of geometric abstraction, is in itself a process of abstraction, a cartoon version, of human thinking and relating to the self and its world.
Paul Donald 2007
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