‘ONENESS II’ (2023) is a celebration of interconnection and the invigoration that we can experience in the resonate company of place and people.
This work was painted during the final year of my PhD research (2023) in which I have deeply explored the art, philosophy, and neuroscience of traditional Chinese painting. Chinese painting is an ancient (and continuing) artistic practice steeped in Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. Within these philosophies of thought is the concept of Oneness. A state of Oneness can be expressed as the perpetual realisation that we are not separate from the world around us. I have contemplated this concept through the praxis of creating this painting.
Through the abstraction of form, using a repetitive, meditative practice of Chinese calligraphic strokes fused with colour fields, I give voice to the permeability and reciprocity of our nature. We are solid yet also receptive beings of matter and energy, in a constant state of flux and sympathetic resonance with our surroundings. We are both separate entities and at once a sum of many parts.
In the process of creating there are fields of discovery that unfurl themselves. My experience has brought me to an understanding of the power of consistency of practice, and the effect of a distillation of small and accumulated efforts over time. I have seen the importance of time alone but also the enrichment of being unified with others.
The physical work, an acrylic painting on canvas measuring 60 x 72inches, took 3 months to paint and was digitised in high resolution by photographer Dr Carl Warner.
Sum of the Parts
This is the first collection by the artist in which her physical paintings are aggregated with their twin NFTs. As traditional painting is brought together with blockchain and digital technologies we break new ground in the field of fine art. We are presented with much to consider in relation to the idea of an artwork’s singularity, its wholeness, its parts and their individual and unified values and the many ways this can be contextualised, interpreted, experienced, and considered.
“What is the reason for a unity/oneness? For however many things have a plurality of parts and are not merely a complete aggregate but instead some kind of a whole beyond its parts, there is some cause of it since even in bodies, for some the fact that the there is contact is the cause of a unity/oneness while for others there is viscosity or some other characteristic of this sort. But a definition [which is an] explanation is one [thing] not because it is bound-together, like the Iliad, but because it is a definition of a single thing.” - Aristotle Metaphysics 8.6
