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SHARP


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Fields of Return
Between Fields

Art for the Ashram






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Between Fields moves through questions of spirituality, ancestry, landscape, and humanity’s relationship to the Divine. Through clouds, rivers, mountains, mist, and atmosphere, the works consider how the sacred might be encountered within the natural world and through states of attention, stillness, and presence. What forms of communion become possible when we slow down enough to listen? How might landscape function not only as place, but as a threshold between the visible and unseen?

Created during my time in Guyan Huaxiang, the paintings emerged through prolonged observation of drifting clouds, dense humidity, still water, and mountain forms that seemed to hold both permanence and transformation simultaneously. The environment became less a subject to depict than a space through which spiritual and ancestral questions could surface. Can atmosphere carry memory? Can the natural world hold traces of the Divine?

This period also brought me into closer proximity with my Chinese ancestry, carried quietly through my great-grandfather - the son of a calligrapher who left Guangdong for Amsterdam, then Curaçao, and eventually Jamaica, where he remained through love. These histories have often existed as fragments, sensed more through intuition than direct knowledge. In returning to China, I found myself wondering how inheritance moves across time, geography, and spirit. What does it mean to encounter a place that already exists within the imagination, the body, or prayer?

The works developed through processes of listening and collaboration rather than mastery or control. Time spent with natural dye artisans and the study of calligraphy transformed my relationship to gesture, inviting slowness, breath, and receptivity into the work. Cyanotype welcomed sunlight into the image’s creation, while rivers and water left their own traces upon the surface. These processes opened questions around co-creation: how might painting become a collaboration between the human, the natural, and the Divine?

Across Between Fields, the paintings remain open spaces of contemplation and transition - fields between self and landscape, ancestry and presence, material and spirit. Rather than offering fixed meanings, the works invite reflection on the subtle ways memory, nature, and the sacred move through one another.



 

Detail Images 
      




Studio Images

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