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A knights tour through a rent in the wall Artist Statement.

I have been told that a noble breed of horses, when overheated and hunted almost to death, will, by instinct, bite open a vein and so recover their breath....to open a vein and gain eternal freedom.1

Years ago I read the story of Frederick Nietzsche and the incident in Turin where he wrapped his arms around a beaten horses neck and wept; a wordless moment when a philosopher became silenced.
A wordless moment.

Language shared can sometimes be a conundrum; it may become illusive. People who believe they are communicating often fail to understand each other. It is the paradox of wanting to be understood, combined with an unrealised expectation of a linguistic relationship that instigated these artworks. In contemporary parlance, the spoken language of madness remains incomprehensible appearing at times to act as an invader. So how can we relate to this alternate state of being? I consider art a medium for drawing a complimentary map of understanding. This room
holds out the real world, framing a moment of stillness.

According to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, art can manifest as a communicator suggesting the work of art is not just an object made apparent by a subject, but rather seizes upon the encounter between sensing and sensed. Art can transform disengagement into a visual strategy of disclosure; it is a means of reaching the viewer, and in this way, art offers an alternative understanding of experience. Art. What isnt it saying? What doesnt
it express? What does it refuse to surrender?

In his book Histoire de la folie l'ge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), Michel Foucault sets about unveiling systems of power by revealing subjugating structures. He presents us with a representation of madness rather than proclaim it outright, and resists the urge to offer us solutions. Foucaults theories can be seen as exposures of a discursive subjugation and the systems by which individuals are imprisoned. These artworks are reflective of Foucaults idea that solutions lie in the exposition of a problem through signification alone.
My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself inextricably drawn back to the chasms edge and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. Edvard Munch

Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 219.

Originating from my locating a site of meaning which appeared between languages, my experience of madness and language are now archived and expressed through these artworks whose potential beauty was derived from these encounters with fragility. What will be seen by the viewer of the artworks will be brief constructions of a witnessing, a mutual understanding, present in the moments of making and seeing. I am not trying to represent what has happened behind the schizophrenics eyes, but rather what has happened in front of my own. I have ventured to make our breath in this space. However, the oscillation between madness and my seeing of it, experiencing, can at times be so rapid as to disallow a distinction between the two of us. This state of being is, to me, beyond language. Emotions war in me constantly. Primal anger, shock, terror, the plunge of grief...a complex relationship, simplified, perhaps, by love. I would like these works to be considered as empathic tools which assist in understanding our connectivity with a human condition. And more broadly with one another.
But when no one is watching, then where are you? Where are you then?

Sandra Uray-Kennett April, 2013.

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