“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.” – Mia Couto
In recent years, we have been confronted with piercing, existential questions that stir the soul. As other artists, I am compelled to create from those stirrings. What will be the future of humanity? Will we have human agency in shaping that future? Or will we submit to unfettered technology as they attempt to shape us into beings that no longer wonder at the world through human eyes? I, for one, will hold onto the human experience as the carrier of the sacred, the human soul.
“I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another’s breath, the color of her hair.
You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.” -Bernard Beckett, “Genesis”
The core of my work emerges in part from personal mythology and from meditations on the human experience organized in the storied narrative, by mingling abstractions with representations, fact and fiction, order and chaos.
Michele Sires-DeLorean