ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My work derives from an imaginative engagement with the act of drawing. Images are developed freely through this process often with minimal and, sometimes, no preplanning. I let the drawing itself guide my actions, the structural shaping calling up associations as the work proceeds. The images emerging from this process, crucially, remain enigmatic;symbolic connections are then made pointing the sensibilities towards deep rooted, dream- like states.

I have for some time been very interested in exploring the borderland between unconscious and conscious thought processes; the subliminal imagery hovering on the threshold of daily experience: the unmediated fantasies surrounding the knowledge we think we have of ourselves; in short, the fragmented and then restructured aspects of the psyche. Thesepsychological processes allow me to move freely between figurative and non- figurative form as the work proceeds. For me, this method of working sets up a poetic response tophenomena as it appears from the hand - a magical state of engagement with the act of being , seeing and imagining.

In painting and drawing psyche engages with matter, magically transforming thought through the melting of boundaries between internal and external phenomena - object andsubject are merged - there is no Cartesian split - meaning is sought in the mysterium coniunctionis ( the divine fire or energy generated through the friction between the materialand the psyche.)

mysterium coniunctionis: An alchemical term borrowed from the title of Carl Jung's last major work on the subject (1956). I understand the term to be a reference to that strangestate of being , all too rarely experienced, when the ego self is overtaken by forces beyond that sense of self; when experience touches on the numinous through poetic vision- a mysterious connection to the infinite.

David Parker, Nov 2000.