About the Work

My current body of work is titled “Know/Gnaw/Naglfar”, and uses myth as a metaphor to explore the nature of knowledge and ideas. In Scandinavian mythology, the Naglfar is a ship being constructed in the underworld. The etymology of Naglfar is from the Old Norse for “nail ferry”, which is both a metonym for the rivets that hold the planks together, and a description of its mythic purpose. The building materials for this ship are the finger and toe nails of the dead, the detritus of the body. When enough discordant people have died and the necessary amount of raw material has been gathered, the ship will be completed, freed from its moorings, and carry the forces of chaos to an eschatological finish for the world. This story provoked a string of associations for me, and gave me pause to reflect on how knowledge and ideologies are defined, hewn and constructed, and ultimately the consequences that follow in their wake. These are often disastrous, and can result from the excesses of philosophical and ideological certainty, or the dangerous limits of knowledge. The ship came to act as a metaphor for the individual and the body; limited, contained and forward moving. Some of the paintings approach these concepts literally, through direct references to history and the cannon of western philosophy, but just as often the approach is oblique, utilizing abstract texts and phrases to provoke associations in the viewer. The myth of the Naglfar became a potent symbol for me. The concepts and philosophies we record on the pages of history are like the planks of a ship, our words and sentences can act as mooring lines and cables, and the nails secure our intellectual aspirations and need to scratch out meaning from the world, whether for good or ill. The paintings are not illustrations of mythology, but attempt to use the tropes of poetry and myth as an alternative means of ingress into history and philosophy.