ANDREA MAGUIRE

BETWEEN CREATION & CHAOS

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
It is difficult to escape the noisy, anxiety-ridden and crisis-oriented world in which we are caught up, the endless tirade of too much information giving us too little information. We are starved amid a huge surplus of spectacle and consumption. Sensing our insecure place in the world we arrogantly attempt to impose a predictability and control over it in our over-confident trust in scientific empiricism, rationalism and materialism.

Perhaps in rare moments we do escape, as did naturalist/philosopher Loren Eiseley, to reposition our focus and peer into the depths to find that the organic process is never predictable or controllable. ‘We can only enter by a great act of the imagination to understand the mysteries in nature.’ (The Immense Journey) Random patterns form, disappear and then reform, preparing the way for ever new reinterpretations. Complex, diffuse, its source is in the unconscious and our own unconscious still reacts readily to it. It is this transitional, ‘between’ space that I too seek to inhabit for it offers a world of possibility. It is where transformation can occur. This is the work for the poet, the artist: look, listen and then be content with silence.