Thank you for joining me here for this quiet little conversation, taking a moment to be with these thoughts, words and images.

The very first body of work I created as an artist was around the idea of balance - I was working with an artist coach at the time who encouraged me to choose a topic that was very significant to me and to create a series of works exploring it. Balance, or rather the lack of it, was a defining quality for me after my vestibular system was damaged during a day surgery, with the result that I could no longer tell where my body was oriented in space.

From the balance series of work came the equilibrium paintings which explored the idea of bringing diverse elements in to balance with each other. The paintings above and below are from when I was using mainly commercially available batiks for my cloth and just beginning to explore painting my own cloth. V

The Oxford Dictionary definition for equilibrium:

equilibrium noun

• a state of balance, especially between different forces or influences

I follow Ryan Holiday at the Daily Stoic, where he writes about Stoic philosophy, one aspect is the concepts around the virtues of temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. Ryan presents the teachings as a coherent yet simple framework to test decisions and actions against. In place of temperance, I like to think of equilibrium instead.

 The Oxford Dictionary definition for temperance:

temperance noun

• the practice of controlling your behaviiour, the amount you eat, etc., so that it is always reasonable

Temperance feels too rigid to me...a holding back, a kind of strictness, with a moral judgement of some kind...equilibrium feels like adjusting and calibrating, more joyful, more organic, more cooperative, holding an awareness of the interplay between the elements. I think it's important to allow ourselves to integrate what makes sense from the many sources of knowledge available to us and leave aside what doesn't. In this way we can evolve gracefully with our own unique voice intact.

And as always, I want to express my gratitude to be living and working on the ancestral & unceded territories of the hən̓̓qəmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples.I honour the incredible depths of grace, courage and perseverance of Indigenous Peoples, and look to them as an example as they find their voices amidst the noise and obfuscation of colonization.

until next time,

Mardell