June 2014

Known / Not Known

I began this body of work “known/not known” in April of 2013 in preparation for two solo exhibitions, one in November 2013 and one in June of 2014. My intention was to make forms that I did not know: ones that I had not made before and that had no pre existing narrative. My intention was to engage with my materials, the processes I had developed for working with them, and to empty myself of knowing what I was making.  

Yet I also knew there were forms quickening inside me that were in want of making. I did not know them; I had never before made them. I felt them and then began to understand them as they took shape.

This way of art making is also the way of dreaming – the sequence of images and actions that arrive from a part of one’s being that is not known. With engagement and contemplation they become known.

My intentions were rooted in my larger artistic ethos as well: to contribute to the vocabulary of a new collective story, a new mythology that names mystery, beauty, stillness, and imagination as crucial to our earthly co-existence. And rooted in my knowing that Art can be a transformer- that it can bypass rational, linear processes and stir the heart.

In late April 2013, my father became ill. His illness, death, and its aftermath became the unexpected accompaniment for the creation of this entire body of work.

Each gesture of the making – each hole drilled, each hair threaded, each knot pulled – marks a moment during my care and vigil for him and my reckoning with the forces that became untethered. These small familiar repetitive acts became my meditation and my thread through the labyrinth. This work became a record of that journey, one that binds and separates us, individually and collectively.

The lands that he lived on that I continue to live on gave the vines and branches that form the looms of some of these pieces. As he told me his hallucinations in his last days, he was describing these veils of hair. And though he never saw this body of work, my father shared with me the perfect and most exquisite gift – his journey from the Known into the Not Known.

This exhibition is the ‘part 2’ of my inquiry into knowing and not knowing. It contains some pieces from the November 2013 exhibition as well as works completed since then.

Visit the artist’s website at millicentyoung.com