Jenny Sages

7 I spend a part of each dry season inland, my work registers these encounters, recording my all pervasive psychological reaction to what I sense to be animistic forces beneath the veneer of everyday reality that provides a link with our inner and outer selves. All our experiences as human beings through history and culture arises from an encounter between ourselves and the land. The meaning we ascribe to things, from important discoveries to the most transient human gesture returns at base to the geological mass we stand on. That geological mass is now under real threat. I feel that art is not so much about creating new things as about recreating in the light of new experience what we already know in order to somehow preserve and nourish it in the difficult times to come. Rainer Maria Rilke in his essay titled ‘Works of Art’ talks about this succinctly and I quote ..... “Perhaps it was always like this. Perhaps there was always a vast, alien expanse between an epoch and the great art which it produced. Perhaps works of art were always as lonely as they are today, and perhaps fame was never anything more than the embodiment of all the misunderstandings which gather round a new name. There is no reason to suppose that things were ever any different. For what distinguishes works of art from all other objects is the fact that they are, as it were, things of the future, things whose time has not yet come. The future from which they arise is remote; they belong to that ultimate century in which one day the great circle of paths and developments will be complete, they are things of perfection contemporaries of the god which mankind has been building since the beginning and which is still very far from completion. If despite all this it seems as if the great works of art of earlier periods were fully at home in the age which produced them, the explanation maybe that the final and wonderful future, the home of works of art, was nearer to those distant days (of which we know so little) than it is to us. Tomorrow was itself part of the remote unknown, it lay beyond every grave, and the images of gods were stones marking the frontier of a kingdom of deep fulfillments.