As an author as well as an artist, my recently published novel In No Time; Eternal Realm of Eros the Life Force develops themes explored in a series of paintings from my exhibition in Spain. These works can be viewed on this site under 'Delfos Series', while the book’s cover on the Homepage shows an image from a follow-on series of artwork in progress ‘Tapestry’.
In No Time was initially sparked by a news of a
Late Bronze Age wreck containing a seal belonging to Queen Nefertiti. This resonated
as I’d recently written an article on Amarna art, the name given to art of the era of
the queen and her ‘maverick’ Pharaoh, Akhenaten. Specifically, the piece references
the provenance of the famous Nefertiti bust, said to have been excavated in
1912. I linked this story of revival, not only with eternal life and the
methods used to achieve it from mummification to cryogenics, but in a quantum
leap, with the idea that evidence of the now iconic family continues to surface
under some impetus of its own.
On
discovering that the family were supposedly consigned to oblivion by their
successors, the dramatic potential of this idea was heightened. Having followed
Berlin's Neues Museum's centenary celebration of the excavation and ‘rebirth’ in
2012, energy gathered around the idea of the ‘bust’ – the sculptural term for a
more or less disembodied head. This morphed into a metaphor for the plight of
the protagonist’s increasing detachment from reality, triggered by an all too
human trauma.
Written in short fictions or
‘scenes’, In No Time's narrative unfolds by circumnavigation,
presenting the subject from different angles and across varying eras and
places as it arcs to a plot that explores consciousness, the
animating force and the nature of beingness. This underlying theme took hold
when, in 2012, synchronous with the Nefertiti bust exhibition and linked to my interest in
cutting-edge science that seems to endorse intangible realms sensed since
Cro-Magnon man, physicists
at the Large Hadron Collider discovered 'a high probability' of the intensely
coveted Higgs Bosun. The ‘probable’ discovery led to new physics positing a
universe in which everything that has been, is, or will be exists
simultaneously as shimmering 'possibilities', suggesting to me that our
increasingly virtual world seems to resonate with metaphysics.
Across the deliberately light
tales that constitute the volume is a motif of polarities: love and hate,
alienation and belonging, the temporal and the eternal, and in
particular, division and unity which interlocks the protagonist’s story with
those of her alter and her shadowy companions, whose
cataclysmic lives reflect her own.
The book is structured in five
parts: Flux, Implosion, Fusion, Fission and Coalescence, inspired
by the evolution of the universe – the cycle of creation and
destruction that overarches the trajectories of the characters and plot. The
choice of this structure was compounded by the title of a thesis synchronously
lit on during research; ‘Destruction as a cause of coming into being’ by
Sabina Spielrein, patient, student, colleague and lover of Jung, later a
colleague of Freud - psychologists who feature prominently in In No
Time.
The story follows the journey
of a dissociative art therapist and her stricken and perplexing patient. As
they tread a tragi-comic course from mutual antipathy to a serenity of sorts
the protagonist stumbles on unalloyed passion, the truly grotesque and
unsuspected selves on her rocky path to a hoped-for return to
integration.
Moving through Jung’s ‘journey
of psychological growth that lies at the heart of religions’, the plot
throws up connections between unlikely bedfellows from ancient, historic and
contemporary times as it unpacks a past that, rather than being distant, is
seen to be vividly present in our ways and beliefs, our humanity itself,
revealing our connection across space and time, and how ‘mysticism’ and
particle physics are uniting to offer hope of a unity beyond schism.
My art and writing express the
unity within diversity that underlies nature’s structures. This driving force
in my work, also my hope for humanity, echoes what Joseph Conrad called an 'underlying source that binds
all humanity together’ and is central to the theme of In No Time, which is
available at the following:
https://www.amazon.com/NO-TIME-Eternal-Realm-Force/dp/1739740009
https://www.waterstones.com/author/jacqueline-sullivan/904745