Words help us understand; they help us form, shape, think and open up. But art in all its wondrous forms touches us directly. When we are touched by words, we are touched by their reaching across to us, the touch of them, not their form; this is the gift of a good speaker. They can leap across the existential abyss and touch us with the artistry of their soul. Such speakers give form and force to the word which becomes much more than a neat verbal formulation. But for me the silence that descends when in the presence of a great image transcends the communicative act; we find ourselves in the presence of Spirit. My mother is a visual artist and I have grown up with her painting and her approach to life as a dance with the divine. I include a selection of her works here to affirm the link between our interior realities, one another and the planet we all share.
Click here to see the works of Marjorie Bussey
"The direction of my work over the past forty years has been a search for enlightenment: not only in the processes or art making but in the search for the sublime in nature.
My first exhibition (1973) looked at dreams and myths and progressively began to develop a language that sought to express the human search for interiority of the spirit.
Some of my later works use the ‘grid', a measuring device superimposed over organic forms to suggest the ecstatic leap, when illumination or just connectedness, fuses and clarifies the unexplainable. Why grid? The human eye divides up, the mind categorises and binds; but the natural, the subliminal - that can puncture categories, erupting, rending scattering fragments of the Sacred, leaving marks in the mundane for us to track.
I guess what I really hope is that the artworks provoke a sense of inquiry-dialogue; calling us to looking beyond habit and surface. I hope you find something totally familiar and totally alien in these works."
Marjorie Bussey
August 5 2006
