"Life Goes On," "Light Lemon with Dark Inversion," and "Cold River Way"

Abstract

As a colourblind person, Owen is interested in monochromatic imagery both as a preferred style of creating artwork and as a conceptual bed of inspiration. Black and white, yin and yang, negative and positive, light and dark. It's impossible to know one without the other. This understanding informs how processes of change occur and how we know and move through the world. Ancient bacteria developed ocular capacities to distinguish the difference between light and dark. They made symbolic associations with this sense to more deeply understand where warmth and life-giving resources are and to understand their place and what to do in it. This dialectical understanding is the basis of living experience as we know it, and our development depends on it. We are constantly responding to a lack of things by inserting things. If either light or dark exists in excess, we lose the ability to know and enjoy dynamics. When they exist harmoniously, we know our place more deeply, hopefully well enough to expand its benefits to those who can see it. This artwork is meant to evoke a dynamic sense of an ever-changing place, and our imminent capacity to expand its bounty in relational harmony with our place and each other.

Media used: clay, scratchboard