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 eight visual artworks, including the first above 'This Place Where We Belong', 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 am moved by tragedies that unfold around the world, some caused by nature, human conflict, and increasingly those caused by the change in our climate. 

The one phrase that I return to that I witness other's say is '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. Two young people above face one another with closed eyes, enveloped by flowers. 'This Place Where We Belong' reminds me of a photomontage and replaces a more surreal sculptural-like image that I had created. On reflection that seems to have been less immediately accessible, for me, an important quality for the first presented in this series.

The images below morph as if from body to the texture of roughly hewn stone and wood. Where limbs meet another's, both become one. We witness their melding, much like the inner unseen nature of the love we feel.

Each is lost in their 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...