Another walk and subsequently, more work on the ‘Palimpsest’ and ‘Hollow Squares’. I started painting the paper cups (for ‘The Light of the Moon’) as well and coating them in graphite, the results of which (below) were quite interesting.
I like the messiness of them – the finger marks inside. They look as if they’ve been dusted for fingerprints, as if we’ve been searching for the individuals who held them and consumed their contents. They are each a fragment of the past, which we can fill (with water), so as to ‘fill the gap’, and thereby see (as per the title) the moon reflected inside, finding the bigger picture (the moon which covers the earth).
There is something interesting too, in the nature of their ‘throw away’ existence. The fact that – as Dogen Zenji says – the light of the moon can be contained within a single bowl of water (or in the case of this work, disposable paper cups) could itself be a metaphor for our own mortality – the bowls, the paper cups become, in effect, like our own eyes.