Magic and Logic – Question 3
Traditional dances feasts and adorations of Baraka. from Daniel CDMs™ on Vimeo.
Why do you cite tribal art as a parallel for your work?
Tribal art is direct. It awakes and connects with the imagination in a naked way. The maker is known within his (it is usually a male) community but becomes anonymous further afield. The way of making is prescribed and transcends individual variations. Function is all important and purpose is fulfilled by following rules that are passed down through the generations. Its main function is to connect with and evoke the elements that it represents, guards or contains.
Tribal art, for the want of a better term deals with archetypal matters that are basic to the human psyche. They serve to engender fear, represent the great phases of life and death, evoke memories and contain the sacred. The ideas are not sophisticated by taste and fashion but dictated by being directed at the innermost parts of the brain. Albeit the work can be executed with skill and great sensitivity, these are qualities that the maker brings to the work, the motifs lie outside the individual and are part of a collective language that all humanity can understand. They bring home concepts that work subliminally because they have been found to do so over time.
My work is a direct appeal to deeply embedded archetypal elements. The subject is not people but goes back in time far beyond anything imaginable. It is a connection with a past that is so distant that it is not recognisable as our own yet it is ours. My work is obvious and clear because the ideas I work with are axiomatic. Poetry arises out of connections and associations and this is no different. The beauty of our ancestry moves me to express this line of connection. My limitations force me to do so through the medium of subliminal motifs embodied in icons. Tribal art often goes beyond representation and the work itself becomes the entity invoked. I do not believe in magic and here is where I part company with my counterpart. However, I do believe in the power of imagination to raise ideas that are not concrete and in this way a magic is conjured that can can stand besides and rival any logic.