Between Two Waters

With the loss of a loved one, once-fixed horizons become unmoored, passages between points in time collapse, and concealed specters suddenly emerge. These works invoke the ocean and its underwater forces and life forms to conjure a world of uncertain space and immeasurable time—the territory of the unabsolute and the in-between.

Untethered to the familiar physics of everyday life, these pieces explore a realm that moves between inner and outer experience, between the recognizable and the outlandish, between a sense of saturation in reality and a longing for what is not and cannot be. Emerging from a repetitive process of rendering and erasure, preservation and effacement, the creation of these images parallels an endless pursuit of reconciling past with present, duration with collapse, disjunction with continuity.

Suspended somewhere between the shadows and the surface, these artworks suggest entry into a world that is as unstable and sinister as it is suffused with hope for healing—an alien, wayward realm in which all is lost, and anything is possible.

Dedicated, with all my love, to the enduring spirit of my beautiful twin brother, John Ross McIlroy.