Moving Weight

 Moving Weight, 2022

Two-person exhibition with Hilma af Klint at CF Hill, Stockholm Sweden

I first met Hilma in writing. She shared a blueprint of her experience as an abstract expressionist that offered me a foothold to build upon. I’ve always been a diarist, and only in recent past did I quite realize how much material is lodged in my own entries—my own blueprints—both reflections, and very accurate predictions. At one point I’d written that I’d like to be in conversation with Hilma af Klint: the artist, the archivist, the mind, the vessel. If my work can serve as footnotes to hers, I hope the extended text provides another dimension through which the importance of abstraction as an intuitive tool may be understood. 

 Hilma’s language is not obvious, but it’s orchestrated; each color has a specific meaning that, when introduced to another color, becomes a formula for an outcome: inception. My colors are less about information and more about gut reactions. In selecting palettes, my body leads: expansion = yes, contraction = no. Intuiting the feeling of color, when we’re taught to prioritize the logical and override internal cues, requires daily, physical, and ritualistic work. It’s through that repeated effort and excavation that transmutation becomes possible; that the artist can imbue something ephemeral or metaphysical in the art. 

When I started working on this show, I was tracing Hilma’s hand; I was looking at similarities in the way we move and in our fascination with polar spaces—her yellow and blue, my paint skin and metal. As I got deeper into the process, I began to see how my colors were expanding on hers, elaborating on an elusive undercurrent guiding shapes, forms, lightness and gravity. What I’m realizing now, is that Hilma and I are joined in our approach to abstraction; in letting it be the glue in the cracks of language and knowing.