Sandra Stanton
“One space spreads through all creatures equally- Inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go Flying through us”
Rainer Maria Rilke
For the last decade, in the Shared Consciousness series, I’ve been exploring the primal link between humans and other species that lies just below the surface of awareness. In the paintings, this nonverbal connection flows through psychological and spiritual levels in a watery landscape on the brink of dramatic climate disruption. The humans are painted from direct observation of the model. Working from life leads to greater concentration on the individual and the constant fluctuations in expression and emotion that take place while the model is posing. It makes each one real. Other species might be messengers from the spirit world, messengers from the unconscious, or messengers from nature seeking to communicate with us. In the space created by merging a sense of interiority with a sense of exteriority, there exist connections with “the other”. This is a world where arrays of familiar and diverse elements unite to form extraordinary circumstances, where an exterior narrative is no more unlikely than its interior counterpart, where other species conduct us to unseen, unfamiliar, or perhaps familiar, realms.