The Parts we Are

No one takes their shape alone. We fold ourselves around other people — and this work is about the pattern that makes.

A woman crouches inside a black square, curled into a compact knot of tangled arms and legs. She repeats eight times across the sheet, in shifting arrangements — upright, sideways, upside down — until her body becomes a strange, restless pattern, blurred further by a net of sharp black lines scored across the surface, like the noise of thought over everything we do.

What is going on here? Look closer — that is the point at which the work opens. Inside the black-and-grey puzzle there is also a man. You don't see him at first. He imitates her posture — bent, folded, holding himself — but in his own way. Two people making the same shape differently: that may be the truest portrait of a relationship I know how to make.

This monochrome puzzle of rectangles and bodies is surrounded by fields of vivid blue, yellow and red — the world's bright, simple order wrapped around our tangled arrangements. The work is a cut-out slice of how people fit together: repeating, mirroring, interlocking, never quite merging.

Some viewers see one woman in eight moods. Some see a crowd. Some find the man immediately, and some only after minutes — and how long it takes you is part of what the work tells you. All readings are right; the work holds them.

From the same cycle as Each in Their Own Orbit, Orbit of Presence, Gravity of the Unseen, Her Horizon and His Horizon — works in which the human figure and the forces around it exchange places.

Offset print, hand-coloured with acrylic · 61 × 42 cm · Limited edition of 10, signed · Certificate of authenticity · [price], shipping included · Shipped in a tube

Did you find the man? Write to me and tell me how long it took — I answer personally.