love dies dancing..., oil on canvas, 180 x 200cm, 2017
Responding to the Rite visually has at times felt like trying to portray life and death simultaneously. The quintessence of life (the dance, the awakening of spring) and the point of death (the death of winter, the sacrifice) – each instigating and somehow essential to the other. This painting and the three drawings that accompany it (Les Filles) derive from a desire to explore more deeply the awful contradiction at the centre of the Rite’s narrative: the awakening of new life must also entail a terrible sacrifice. Spring is the beginning, but also an appalling end.
The resulting ‘dancers’ in these works are intended as paradoxes between the two states. Poised somewhere between dancing and drowning they are at once symbols of fertility – of life – and reminders of our fragile mortality.
The resulting ‘dancers’ in these works are intended as paradoxes between the two states. Poised somewhere between dancing and drowning they are at once symbols of fertility – of life – and reminders of our fragile mortality.
