Mnemosyne carries all the weight of our collective unconscious embedded in our desire to find/understand the shape of things. Spirals have a double movement that opens outward or draws back, a twofold rhythm of liveliness and creation, and withdrawal and entropy. This inward outward motion is a pattern recording the material life of time. The figure in the background is appropriated from ‘Burial of the Wood’ by Piero della Francesca.
In Earth drill, Chthonic birds float around this Wollongong earth drill’s spiral. Their elongated tongues extend to pollinate flowers or interpenetrate eyes, suggesting symbiotic exchange and networks akin to neural synapses of the brain, where branched forms metaphorically float around in watery heads transmitting meaning. The painting might be considered an oily network of memory, the brain inside out, where geometric ‘treelets’ interact with biomorphic forms . A mould for industrial manufacturing doubles as the sun while other moulds spin out in the underworld.