“There is Always a Way” - escaping the loop Probably one of the longest gestating sculptures I have done, 11 months to finish and the 9th and final work in the Mahara Series of sculptures. It sat barely started while the wider world got in the way, excuses excuses, until it seemed i was pushed into completion. The concept was quite simple and it is surely about “illusion”, the illusions within life and wider. The start point was the idea of a Moebius Strip and the perplexity generated when one side becomes another side and the resultant self imposed mind games. A metaphor for the concept of how life can seem. Inter-looped through this, on a more personal level, is another closed loop of an individual life. 

The Moebius Strip is a concept within mathematics and cannot per se, exist for us despite the temporary wonderment of trying to get ones head around it, twists and all. Conscious beings within ’normal reality’ can have no direct experience of it as at any point within the ‘expanse’ of two dimensions, it would have an infinite yet unseeable/unknowable ‘view’, (a 3D concept), no boundaries, just an interaction of self really........ It seems to me that to ‘know’ such a space requires a point of view other than an experience of only two dimensions and as such consciousness, ie the ‘knowing’ department, existing in two dimensions or less would be aware but not “aware of.........” that requires a minimum of a third dimension and thus a descent up into creation, defined and limited. One dimension......? well yes. No dimensions........... ??? pure creative principal minus the description about it.... Anyway this being the case(?) and awareness being ultimately unlimited there needs to be an ‘out’ - a knowing awareness out of the illusion - in this case it is represented by the two Koru of creativity on the strip, with the bulk of the stone to be taken as representing undefined potential, (minus the stone of course). Confused, just go with the flow, nothing ever stays still enough to truly define, a futility of form one might say thus the feel of it contains an out. (The sculpting of the strip aspect had me often wondering if the twists and turns were sculpted right, how to represent it in 3D turning a boundless aspect into something within the world, not at all helped by realizing that if you inflated a strip it becomes a tube, which is a surface with only direction and no means of defining the extent of it.......... sigh :-) So that was the start point, consciousness a somewhere-not that seems all to familiar to many, concepts of the wheel of time etc and so forth....... Then we have a representation of individual lives within a seeming never ending cycle, in this case an inflated strip form intertwined within the illusion, on which a life story is written and created. I am guessing it is no accident it turned out as an infinity symbol........ it sort of seems that way at times. However with “as above so below” in mind, and that ‘there is always a way’, a way out in this case............ we have some detail to ponder.

In this representation of a life path we see various detail, woven and/or presented into the path, some of it flows some doesn’t, yet for many it seems an endless running around a defined, thus limited, space. Although at any particular point there is always something just around the corner, just over the brow there.......... but it is still a form of Hamster Mill, quite likely imperceptible from within until one steps into a different viewpoint/dimension. The Trinity is also present as possibility within the path, feeding either way, a more defined/detailed path some would call higher. A path out within life’s greater path but still bound within layers of illusion. If one looks closely at the detail of the path it can be seen to overlap itself in two sets of 3 Koru, beginnings and endings within creative potential and maybe indicative of life to life.......... The combined number of these Koru is 6/six a number associated with aspects of Love and thus to my mind an overarching feature within potential during the life/death/life path format of duality. If looked at as a whole there is a more than passing relationship of form between this and the head of a traditional  maori Tiki which, according to tradition, is a representation of the first man, (and just maybe, one all too often stuck in his own head in this case :-) So what does it all mean then????  I haven’t a clue that’s your department, my detail is different :-)