Bondage: Keeping Us From Ultimate Freedom
Do you ever feel like there is something in your life, in your mind, something that causes great suffering and anxiety, but you just can’t shake it, can’t come to terms with it, can’t find a way to deal with it? Or maybe there are things in your life that you are extremely attached to like an opinion or an object or a desire that could potentially keep you from being free within yourself yet you don’t even know that those things are blocking you from this ultimate freedom?
The concept of bondage in Hinduism and Buddhism refers to the nature of human suffering due to our egoistic attachments to the physical world, our opinions, our passions and our desires that keep us from liberation and truly being free.
To create the work in the Bondage series, I start with a single piece of stretched canvas, that which is whole and unified, and proceed to cut, tear, rip, and shred that canvas into separate yet still connected pieces that are falling from the frame. The ripped pieces are then tied back together again into a unified whole. Once again referring to the yin/yang nature of the universe, the pieces are at once separate and at once whole.
This work represents an action of violent emotion and tumultuous suffering, that which is human, that which resides in all of us, and rearranges those emotions back into a work of unified beauty. The creation of this work is an act of hope and an act of truth that pushes us to see beyond our suffering and our attachments and to realize a place of unity, connection and oneness. Though we all suffer these egoistic feelings of doubt, fear and anxiety, feelings that potentially keep us in bondage and attachment, they are ultimately only delusions and constructs within a greater truth of freedom and liberation.
This is a reoccurring theme in my work.
