The Alien World Around Us: An Artist's Perspective
For a long time, I allowed my art to remain intuitive. I explored different mediums, different materials, different ways of making. I never really followed a map. I never wanted to make art by copying a formula, a style, or even an expression that had already been defined for me.
It wasn't even about expression, at least not in the way I understood it.
It was more like trying to comprehend something I could feel but could not name.
My connection with the unknown.
In the beginning, it was easy. My art practices were playful and calm. I made things because I wanted to make them. I followed whatever pulled me in and allowed myself to move from one medium to another without asking too many questions.
But slowly, something changed.
The practice began demanding more from me. The experiences became more intense. The questions became heavier. What had once been a quiet place to play became a place where I started encountering parts of myself I didn't know how to hold.
And somewhere along the way, I began to feel completely lost.
There was an emptiness inside me, but I didn't know what to call it.
So I started reading. I picked up books hoping that somewhere inside them I would find an explanation. Perhaps someone had already experienced this feeling. Perhaps someone had found a name for it. Perhaps there was a word for the strange space I had entered, or at least a direction I could walk in.
The books helped. I found experiences and knowledge that felt familiar. I read about people who had gone through their own versions of emptiness, transformation, questioning, awakening, whatever we choose to call these things.
But there was always something missing. Their experiences were theirs.
I could read about what they felt, what they discovered, what they believed came next. But none of it could tell me what I would feel when I arrived there.
Would it be bliss? Would it be another disappointment?
Would I find something beautiful or simply another room inside myself that I didn't know how to leave?
After a while, I began to feel that I was reading the same thing again and again.
Different words. Different authors. Different philosophies. But somewhere beneath it all, the same recipe kept appearing. The same chemical formula. The same road map for moving through emptiness and coming out somewhere else.
I began to understand the theory. But knowing the road map didn't tell me what the journey would actually be like. I didn't know what season I would travel through. I didn't know where I would sleep, what the landscape would look like, who my fellow travellers would be.
I didn't even know exactly where I was going. And perhaps that was the point. Because slowly, without realising it, I began to travel anyway. I became more aware of my surroundings. Of other living beings. Of the small movements happening around me that I had once considered insignificant.
And, strangely, I began to feel a sense of depth inside myself. My art practices became more natural, and life became much simpler. I left a few people behind. Some still judge me for the way I choose to live, for the things I value, for the choices I make.
But I stopped caring as much.
I met people who were not entirely interested in participating in the robotic rhythm of life. I began to feel increasingly detached from overconsumption, from the constant hunger for more things, more status, more experiences to display, more reasons to prove that a life is worth living.
I became less interested in the material world and more interested in what was happening underneath it. I started noticing how much of what we call normal is simply something we have collectively agreed not to question. And somewhere in all of this, I felt a very tiny elevation.
Not some grand transformation.
Nothing dramatic.
Just enough distance to occasionally see myself from somewhere outside myself.
To observe my own thoughts.
My own habits.
My own contradictions.
And from there, perhaps, I could begin to see what was missing. I think being an artist has something to do with this way of seeing. I don't look at the world in quite the same way anymore.
Flora and fauna slowly became my definition of beauty. Not perfect bodies. Not glass skin. Not the carefully constructed faces and forms we have collectively decided are beautiful. I found beauty in a crooked leaf.
In the architecture of a mushroom. In the strange body of an insect.
In the way a bird moves its head before it flies. In the almost alien structure of a flower I had walked past a hundred times without really seeing.
And as I became more fascinated by other species, something else happened.
I began to lose interest in my own. Not completely. I still love people. I still feel deeply for them.
Perhaps that is the strange contradiction.
The more distant I feel from humanity, the more empathy I seem to have for it.
I look at us and feel sad. And sometimes I feel angry. We behave as if this planet belongs to us.
As if everything else is here for our use. As if intelligence has a hierarchy and, naturally, we have placed ourselves at the top. But the Earth is not our property. It is a shared space.
There are creatures here who understand things we don't. Who navigate using senses we cannot imagine. Who communicate without our languages. Who build, migrate, adapt, survive and cooperate in ways that our own intelligence sometimes struggles to comprehend. And yet we continue to destroy the very world that holds us.
There seems to be so little respect for one another. So little respect for other species.
So little respect for the planet. And somehow, even for ourselves.
We have invented countless reasons for destruction, including the destruction of our own species.
And still, we call ourselves the most intelligent beings here.
The more I think about this, the more my consciousness seems to push me deeper.
Every creature I encounter begins to feel extraordinary.
Their movements.
Their bodies.
Their ways of living.
Their intelligence.
Their strangeness.
Everything about them feels alien to me.
And perhaps that is what fascinates me most.
We spend enormous amounts of energy looking into outer space, searching for the unknown. We send machines into darkness. We look for life on distant planets.
We wonder whether something else exists somewhere beyond our reach.
And all the while, the unknown is already here. It is crawling under stones. Growing on trees. Moving through the grass. Flying above our heads. Swimming beneath the water.
Living beside us.
We have barely begun to understand the life that already surrounds us. Science continues to discover new species, new behaviours, new forms of life, as if the world is constantly reminding us that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do.
I wonder about this a lot. And the more I wonder, the more these creatures inspire me.
Somewhere along the way, my art began to change again. It became less about making something beautiful and more about trying to understand a connection I could feel but couldn't explain.
A spiritual sense. A feeling of something godly. A kind of beauty that exists beyond language. A depth that I don't know how to measure.
And eventually, my art became almost entirely about creatures.
Not only the ones I can see. But also the ones I imagine.
The ones that seem to exist somewhere between what is real and what is felt.
I began creating creatures that don't belong to any field guide.
They come from different worlds. Different planes.
Different places that perhaps cannot be seen, but can somehow be felt.
I don't know if I am inventing them. I don't know if they are fragments of things I have seen. I don't know if they are simply products of an overactive imagination.
Or if imagination itself is another way of seeing.
Perhaps they are just a way for me to give a form to something that has no form. Something I cannot photograph. Something I cannot prove.
Something that lives somewhere between intuition and memory, between nature and the unknown.
I think this is where my art has brought me. Not to answers. But to a different way of asking questions. I began by exploring mediums. Then I began exploring myself.
Then I started looking outward. And the more I looked outward, the deeper I seemed to go inward.
Now, when I walk through a forest, I don't feel like I am walking through an empty space filled with trees. I feel surrounded. By lives I don't understand. By intelligence I cannot measure.
By creatures whose worlds are happening alongside mine, mostly unnoticed.
And sometimes I wonder if perhaps the emptiness I was trying so hard to get rid of was never really empty.
Perhaps it was simply a space I had not yet learned how to see.
And perhaps that is why I keep painting these strange creatures.
Maybe they are not coming from another world at all.
Maybe they have been here the whole time.
Maybe they were simply waiting for me to become quiet enough to notice them.
And sometimes, when I look at them for long enough, I have the strange feeling that they are looking back.
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