Bearing Witness  | No Angels | Thinking out Loud |  Bated Breath | Stru's Bob | Youngblood | Commune.1 | Group Shows | Works on Paper

Our first and last breath bookend our lives.Yet now the universal sanctity of breath is in jeopardy.

A natural phenomenon, breathing happens so instinctively that most of the time we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. The pandemic, however, has inadvertently drawn our attention to it. A world held to ransom by this virus has given rise to a collective holding of our breath. It also brought us face to face with the devastation of our natural resources and we are thus losing our breath on a planet in crises.

Political and social deadlocks have manifested in violence that shuts off breathing. To add insult to injury, protesters in support of racial justice in the wake of the ‘I can’t breathe’ George Floyd tragedy were fired on with teargas!

Bated breath is to hold one’s breath in anticipation or trepidation. A hovering. A suspension. An uncertainty.

This body of work attempts to capture the pathos of our current experience by evoking the uncertainty of these times – the conflicted underlying sense that things are not what they seem or should be. There is a painful longing or nostalgia. A staying in place, a looking inwards, and a marking of time. And the quiet dignity of overcoming fear.

Holding our breath may signify waiting, and yet waiting with bated breath signifies the indomitable nature of the human spirit – hope.