Arcanum, 2020
Archival pigment ink prints on cotton rag
The work takes its title Arcanum from surrealist artist André Breton's Arcane 17, written in exile in 1944 while overlooking Percé Rock on the coast of Québec. Conceived amidst the devastation of the Second World War, Breton's text draws together mythology, alchemy and the symbolism of the Tarot's seventeenth arcanum - The Star - to imagine the possibility of renewal after catastrophe. Against the violence of history, he turned towards qualities embodied by the feminine: intuition, imagination, love and transformation, proposing these as the foundations for cultural regeneration. The title Arcanum carries this idea further. Derived from the Latin arcanus, meaning "secret" or "hidden," it refers not only to concealed knowledge but to truths revealed through contemplation and transformation. Like the Tarot's Major Arcana, its mysteries are not solved but gradually disclosed through experience.
Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, beginnings and endings, is traditionally depicted looking simultaneously towards the past and the future. In Arcanum, however, the androgynous figure’s gaze extends beyond chronology towards another order of time. Janus no longer looks simply backwards and forwards. He looks between two fundamentally different ways of experiencing time: the historical time of human civilisation and the geological time of the Earth itself. One face remains turned towards humanity's myths, conflicts and aspirations; the other meets the enduring presence of Percé Rock, a landscape formed over hundreds of millions of years whose slow erosion renders human history momentary by comparison.
Standing between these temporal worlds, Arcanum reimagines the threshold Janus guards. It is no longer simply the passage between past and future, but between human history and planetary time, inviting us to recognise ourselves not at the centre of time, but as participants within the Earth's far older rhythms.
A version of this work was exhibited as a finalist in the Gosford Art Prize 2023
