The Portals
Ink and graphite on paper36 x 48 cm
Image courtsey of A.I., London, by Lucy Emms
Be here now. The didactic and sagging new age koan beleaguers, tires. This now is too much. It is hard and mean, deadly, unjust. The globe heaves under the weight of this past year’s events, and the news cycle echoes in tragic refrain. The overload of stimulation and inane horrors short the capacity to attend, particularly and most devotedly, to the heavy present.
Laura Hindmarsh’s waterscapes are both portal and destination. Lines of text drift in aimless currents of blues and blacks, prompting more aimlessness, suggesting poetry. It seems that in this placeless space, Hindmarsh offers escape as meaningful vehicle and purposed exit, as if escape were a destination unto itself. And in this time, it is. Hindmarsh’s images are screen-shaped exit-signs, pointing to a way out, at least for a while. The artist posits sea and screen as synonymous liminal environments— citizen-less, weather-less, identity-less, shape-less free zones, as soothing and hypnotic as a heartbeat. Sea and screen, holy theatres of capacious expansion, present themselves as vast and roomy halls of distilled being, opening and closing repeatedly in a tidal offering of possible other life, antidote and mirror to loneliness and overload.
Sea, swallow me.
Fly me to the moon underwater. I am here with me now, and my waking dreams are made of sky and sea. The world is in me. I carry all of its trappings and possibilities in the electric hum that orders and guides the rhythms of my pulse. It is conductor and muse, this beat.
Listen to it pound as I hold my breath.
Plunge.
Float.
The world around me blurs, but my visions are still in focus.
My body weightless buoy, the suspension of gravity a life raft, the blessed interiority and its
possibilities, an embrace.
- Text by Amy Bernstein
Amy Bernstein is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, California.
