At The Edge (2014)
At The Edge (2014)
Shortly after the birth of my two children, I felt a severe loss of spontaneity and freedom in my life. Right up until they were born, I spent days making art, alone in the back country, summiting mountain peaks and sailing across oceans.
The overwhelming responsibility of caring for two vulnerable and demanding babes, land-locked, in suburbia, left me yearning for transcendence. I longed to get back to the ocean where I had been living on a 38' sailboat.
Keen on sailing lore and legends, I read that "the romantics believed seafaring gave you a sense of nearing the eternal; it was the closest to the sublime you could experience. At sea, with no reference points, floating on a liquid medium, all sense of reality as we know it on land is lost." Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) discusses the power of the sublime: "Sublimity considers wonder in things unknown, such as nature or the sacred." Burke suggests the ocean as the perfect example.
I had experienced this while spending time at sea mostly alone for 27 days in a small sailboat and longed to recapture that feeling. My cinematic diptychs express the different moods and wide expanse of the ocean while at the same time, they capture my shifting emotions as a mother. They depict both my contentment finally becoming a mother and my dismay yearning for freedom and spontaneity.
I created each image at the edge of the vast Pacific Ocean, only yards from shore while my children swam at arm's length just out of frame. I found peace and balance as an artist, woman, and mother in making this series.
Print Information:
20" H x 40" W archival pigment print float mounted with French cleat-$820
40" H x 82" W archival pigment print float mounted with French cleat-$3200