Do Not Leave Me
· With Love Embrace ·
Piano: One Instrument, Many Voices
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When we are lost with love for another, as we embrace, all else disappears.
The piano piece 'With Love Embrace', and nine visual artworks touch upon the emotional force of our leaving a loved one: for a brief period; without knowing when or if one might be with that person again; and when death parts us.
For some, love extends to life more generally. To animals and other sentient beings, and to its broader reach of living things.
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I was moved by the tragedies that unfolded in South Korea and India in late 2022, and these together with the continuing wars in Ukraine and elsewhere led me to create the artworks here. The mirrored figures above are to be viewed as a whole, its black boarder and central dividing line represents the darkness that separates and surrounds each in their longing.
The one phrase that I returned to that I felt and witnessed other's say was 'do not leave me'. I find it especially poignant when a young person's embrace is their last. The fragility of being young, yet passed childhood, is the acute realisation that love can be lost, not through choice, but cruel circumstance and chance. For those older, the experience that love is unique in its qualities as it relates to each individual, makes its loss profoundly difficult to contemplate, yet also heightens its value and significance. Some recover from this intensely emotional experience, while others are unable to, or perhaps pretend as much to themselves as to others, that it never existed.
The figures in these artworks appear both real yet dream like. They morph as if from body to the texture of roughly hewn stone and wood, and where hands meet the ribs of another, both become one. We witness others meld, much like the nature of the love we feel.
The figures are shown at a time of their changing from one state to another. Each are lost in embrace. Each image, a celebration of life for others in their moment of love. With one's most loved, as family, friend, colleague, or comrade. This is their time when love stands still.
These artworks allude to love's most powerful of qualities: that time has no force to change love's strength.
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The first image below is the complete artwork that accompanies the music when people listen elsewhere.
Six Embraces follow: The First Embrace, The Second Embrace, The Third Embrace, The Fourth Embrace, The Fifth Embrace, The Sixth Embrace. Each embrace is captured as if a carving of a moment in time, where bodies of bone, muscles and sinew show the longing and gesture for those we love. The shape, colour, and texture of love for one, is for that person or those persons, unique. Each moment of love, a world of felt experience to be recognised and valued...
The final image on this page is a full size extract from Do Not Leave Me.
