The barrier between life and art has been a question with which human beings creation that was already expressed in the ancient Greek myths of the artist.
Material, for what seem to be obvious reasons, has been the nexus of this inquiry: It is the given, the limit of our capacity to create. And we have, accordingly, been content, by and large, to see it as merely the stuff of our art and form as its real content, as the occasion for other purposes and effects, the positive to which the negative of human work or human creation, is applied, which, as Hegel understood it, is the death of nature, its transformation, its subordination to the extraneous and often, as it happens, willful or irrational, and even pernicious, purposes of humanity.
For me, as an artist very powerfully, but as a person even more intimately and expansively, and my relationship to it, and I believe everyone else’s as well, is the bedrock of all understanding, sympathy, respect, decency, and trust.
Our distant forebears endowed the waters, the winds, trees, plants, stars, mountains, and their special places with spirit by way of saying that these were the sources of power and mystery that had drawn them out of their animal languor and awakened their souls, that spoke to them in the still remembered language of the earth.
For the material to have become mere instrument, or from its debasement and our own, from the suffering and destruction of the animate, now also reduced to just stuff, and from understanding our own complicity in that descent.
Icons in Ash beautifully transforms the material of ash into a picture form for you to cherish of your loved one and become closer to them every day.
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