Statement

I use the practice of drawing and painting as a means of communion with the world
around me, and the world within myself. Through creating, I come into intimate contact with things that exist beyond my understanding. Boundaries between entities dissolve, and I perceive the permeability of what religious scholar Mayra Rivera refers to as the “flesh” of the world. Flesh, unlike a singular body, is formless, impermanent, and always becoming. Words, light, water, earth and life are all flesh, and what is flesh also becomes spirit. I paint to bring the deepest and most elusive parts of myself into the shared world of flesh. In essence, I paint to become.

My entwined artistic and spiritual journeys are rooted in my relationship to the natural world, and nurtured through internal exploration. With the loss of my twin brother, mother, and father, I have come to see my inner world as a “wilderness”—a space that harbors great danger as well as extraordinary wonder. Art is my attempt to navigate the forces and features of this territory. It is a search for truths that lay outside the light of full awareness. As Rivera also states, “Poetics is a practice of engaging the world, in which one risks being transformed.” The paradigms of my youth perished with the death of my family, but out of this extinction a new existence has emerged. Devoid of past certitudes, anything is possible. Anything can “become.”

Becoming is, I have learned, necessarily a process of “wholing.” It is a weaving into oneself of all that was previously unrecognized or othered. It is a bridging of the gap between the limits of one’s current knowledge and new states of awareness. As author Leo Tolstoy says, “Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious.” Here, in the open and immediate space of the creative act, polarized aspects within the artist can be harmonized, and spontaneous insight becomes possible. Art not only provides this integrative and visionary pathway for the individual, but it also links the private spaces of the artist’s mind and heart with those of others. As Tolstoy goes on to say, “A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist." Art, therefore, is fundamentally “a means of union among men…indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.” Art, in its unifying capacities, is essential to the health and wholeness of all people, and to the entire flesh of the world in which, and of which, we are constituted.

My drawings and paintings point to this enmeshment of environments, minds and bodies, setting perceived boundaries between ourselves and others asunder. They explore questions such as philosopher Karen Barad’s query, “When two hands touch, how close are they?” Or writer Don DeLillo’s reflection, “What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another’s eyes?” Arising from an inherently nondual perspective, these works attempt to connect the enduring with the temporal, the visible with the invisible, the physical with the spiritual. They seek to dismantle the illusion of separateness, and suggest how infinitely woven, how radically interdependent, and how elegantly exposed we are to one another. As contemplative Beatrice Bruteau speculates, “What if true persons are circles whose centers are nowhere and whose circumferences are everywhere, interpenetrating each other with an intimacy that we can scarcely imagine?”

Once, while dreaming, I heard a voice say, “If you want to change the shape of something, start around the most flexible edge.” We are the most flexible edge in the shape of our world, and art is perhaps the most refined of shaping tools. Our consciousness, like the water in a river, is only superficially contained. River water, never truly confined to its banks, flows down and out through porous sediments, surfacing again in other places. Likewise, when an artist looks deep into the rivers of their being, the work made within these waters percolates through them. It moves outward through the delicate tissues of their flesh, nourishing life near and far. Art, therefore, is more than a symbol for experience. It is more than a reflection of a thought or feeling. It is a way to change the contours of one’s reality, and the larger reality of which one is a part. I wish to pursue my art practice as a whetstone for awareness. I want to dive deep, and bring back the boons. For what if, like riverbeds, there is no bottom or boundary to our being, and therefore no limit to how far our gifts can travel?

Bio

Emily McIlroy was born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in 2005 and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2011. When she’s not in her studio, Emily enjoys reading, writing, and walking and swimming her way through various terrestrial and aquatic wildernesses. She currently teaches in the Drawing and Painting Program at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.