The Heart is a Bridge

About this artwork

The heart is a bridge “Between the idea     And the reality     Between the motion     And the act     Falls the Shadow                                     For Thine is the Kingdom         Between the conception     And the creation     Between the emotion     And the response     Falls the Shadow                                     Life is very long         Between the desire     And the spasm     Between the potency     And the existence     Between the essence     And the descent     Falls the Shadow” T.S. Eliot (The Hollow Men) On reading the curatorial statement of Shadowlands by Womanwithstick (AKA Jan Sargeant), I remembered a poem that had a profound effect on me - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men. This poem by T.S. Eliot evokes for me the human experience of the shadowlands. The uncertain worlds of emotional shadows that fall between past, present and future selves severing a sense of continuity in life’s trajectory. Life is often thought of as a continuous flow from here to there, there to here, but life like time is neither singular or consistent. I know this to be especially true when life is radically shifted by circumstances or events so eviscerating that the result is a fissure between present, past and future. Something by which we can say, that was then...and this is now. A rupture between a present self and a past self. A tear in the fabric of time, in the fabric of the self - a shadowland where neither past, present nor future exist in the body of the self. Reality goes on, but in the shadowland, time seems to be of another quality. The geography of the heart loses it compass. This work, The Heart is a Bridge, portrays the dissonance between now and then; the disorienting lostness in a disembodied self where the past is nostalgia and the present surreal. The past self with all its limitations, and a self still unformed and forming, yet held in abeyance. Yet the shadowland is also a time of beginning: from the formless, the form is formed. What can bridge the divide? What can guide the deconstructed self back to wholeness? The heart. The heart appears as a bridge between our past selves and our present, reaching out towards the unknowable future. Sometimes, in the rupture between past and present the heart is broken, and so it is constructed again. And again, bringing us into the present, drawing us across the shadowlands; bridging our disparate selves into a new whole, a whole that is at once singular and plural containing all that was, all that is and all that will be. Both the shadowed land and the light. This is the nature of the heart. And this too, is the nature of art.