Acrylic on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

Part of my Sleep series, with this painting I started to think about the relationship between the dissolution of our consciousness of self as we pass into the abstract world of REM sleep cycles, and the movement of dust in space, the potentials of dark matter and how stars are formed and destroyed in nebulae. Also about the way that dark matter pervades all of space and is constantly moving through us.

Shannon Berry Bam is a circus performer in Brisbane and we have worked on several paintings together. Like almost all of the physical performers, her sleep is both restorative and highly active and almost every time I’d look back from my canvas to her, she would be in a slightly different position. I love all of that and just keep painting them in their various new places and wait for them to cycle around again to approximate positions to continue my work.

Not a lot is actually known about dark matter, it’s one of those things that physicists have theorised and seems to make sense, though they have no real proof of, it would just make life simpler for them if we believed in it… I can live with that for a painting or two.. There have been some quite expensive tests to prove the existence of dark matter, all pretty inconclusive so far. But it is an elegant theory. Essentially it is what may make up the slight density of the universe and is lightly charged.

To me in this painting, Shannon is the essence of dark matter moving towards the ‘Eye of God’ nebula, which is in turn quietly watching all of our passing history.