Metamorphosis To Gravity

How ideas generate, grow, and evolve, is as fascinating to me as actually having an idea.

Years ago I read Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  I had no conception of the part the story would play in my own metamorphosis as painter.  Working on a project that suggested itself from the story led me to the artwork I do now. The Metamorphosis project helped me gain freedom of seeing, thinking and working as an abstract artist.

Metamorphosis is a story about Gregor, the grown son of a family he was supporting. Gregor wakes up one morning to discover he has morphed into a bug.

The story is a psychological metaphor exploring family relationships and dependency. In the story Gregor’s father throws apples at him, one lodges in Gregor’s back and eventually leads to his death.

Mentally inside the story I used it as the starting point for the project. Thinking of the apple rotting in Gregor’s back; I made ‘backs’ from papier-mâché and fabric, lobbed in apples and left them to rot.

The lobbing action reminded me that Gregor had been able to walk on the ceiling but not wanting to antagonise his father had remained on the floor.  I thought of gravity, if Gregor had been on the ceiling he might not have ended up with an apple stuck in his back.

The story is very surreal.  Waiting for apples to rot is also surreal.  I like inspiration and ideas to reside in the unconfined space of my mind. I like the balance of doing and thinking; so having the patience to wait for apples to rot wasn’t going to be enough. Other fruit joined the rotting process, each fruit isolated and trapped in a grid of cheesecloth attached to a panel. The panel was vertical on the wall so that any rotting juices traced their downward movement.

The downward movement got me interested in the idea of gravity and the tracing action of the process was feeding into work years later.