Holding Space
in the endless ground of the sky
A few of my handmade paper, litmus, ash and soil works on canvas are currently hanging on the wall at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn. To some, these works, compared to my dense figurative drawings, might look strangely empty. For me, these works are about holding space.
What does it mean to hold space? This is a term used often, in challenging conversations, in tender moments, as a means of acknowledging conflict or offering support. Drawings use marks that engage our senses in various acts of space-holding. A drawn line might indicate the fullness of a shape we can’t entirely see, but whose weight we hold in the net of our sensation. A mark on a paper surface might push or pull us through portals of space in our perceptual flows and fields.
How do we humans hold space? In the smoke of the summer 2023 Canadian wildfires, my work formed itself around the question: is there a way to collaborate with the atmosphere, to let the atmosphere draw its own portrait in this moment? In other words, how can my work be an act of holding space for the sky?
The human is a concept, a frame drawn around groupings of relations and processes that is learned, reinforced and territorialized through bio-political-social occupations naturalized as scientifically objective facts. And while the shape of the space held by the human has been framed differently throughout history, the conceptual framework of the Enlightenment Man, as a shape cut out of nature, has been a hard one to break out of. Whether the smoke we breathe is from the climate-induced burning of Canadian forests, the capitalist-induced burning of Amazonian jungles, or from incomprehensible acts of violence filling our skies, our lungs and our hearts, we feel the incalculable damage of that conceptual space, a space held apart, a human-shaped hole in the sky through which missiles can be dropped, a hole we believe we can climb through to clear cut and drill and climb back out out of, a hole that lets us believe there are sides, binaries, a here and there, a this not that.
Holding space isn’t easy when you have been shaped by cultural forces telling you that all space is yours to take. When I engage in an act of holding space, I am engaged in an act of decentering myself, of becoming background. In an artwork, we would call this relationship figure and ground. Figure ground relationships are the way we perceive ourselves in space. In visual art, this means the identification of foreground and background. For example: if you have a watercolor painting that is made up of a lot of washy blobs of yellow and orange and then you have a big bold blue rectangle floating over the blobs, that blue rectangle would be considered the figure. A figure doesn't have to be a person or dog or a tree, it could be anything that stands out as something that is different from the space around it. And this differentiation is considered to be a function of normal perception.
Another way that figure ground is spoken about is in terms of belonging: what edge belongs to what shape? What is the boundary between one thing and another? One of my favorite quotations on figure and ground is by the art historian James Elkins who writes:
"The relation is so fundamental that it can easily – without any special pleading or technical introduction – be claimed as the basis of understanding and meaning itself. Without a contrast between one thing and another, I cannot know anything: whether it is the distinction between a printed letter and its white page, or the difference between the person I love and every other person."
What is the scale of holding space for the sky? How do we hold space when we are taught that our native language is the identification of ourselves as a figure against the world, that the act of speaking is the act of naming this not that? We’ve been told that we live in a world of things, that the sky is a thing, and that we are things under it. But we can’t truly nounify the sky. It resists capture and in its resistant vastness renders us an abstraction. To speak with sky we must speak our unmaking. To commune with sky we must be rendered endless ground.
I am not making an image out of the sky. To make something out of a feeling or experience is a distancing. Making something out of something requires that I create boundaries, that I name territories and through that naming make something that illustrates, explains, or interprets. Holding space for the sky renders me incapable of making. I could say, instead, that the sky draws me. It draws me away from the idea that the world is already made.
What happens when we come into being space rather than being the ones who hold it? For centuries, humans have looked up at the sky and felt stirred by a sense that we are both more and less than a collection of edges belonging to a shape called human. We call this void, time, God, or space. Holding space for the sky troubles the way I occupy my relations. It’s hard to feel held by the world of things when you don’t have definitive edges. I draw myself into shapes of coherence so that I can participate in a world that is perceived as constituted by fixed entities. And then I draw myself back out of it. Neither is comfortable, nor is it easy on those who seek out my legibility. Holding space, I recognize that I am made in the image of sky, that I am space held in endless ground. This is my work. This is my prayer.
*All works are for sale. Contact me for prices.