“It” rests on Straws

Artist: Tamantha Williams
Title: ‘It” rests on Straws
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 101cm x 50cm
Unframed

Brief Synopsis
Ever felt wholly and completely safe? Ever made plans to ‘secure’ your future? If anything taught us that reliance on future is an illusion, this year has surely seen to that… plans made evaporated, security of self tethered on a thin mask between you and me… we placed our faith in sanitizer and separation! 2020, ‘a tiny mad idea’?
Consistently we build up walls of defence, from birth to maturity we feel safety for ourselves lies in setting certain parameters in place, having plans for the future in place, boundaries that cannot be crossed, love that cannot be given, forgiveness not due, but as we have learnt through an insane contrived sense of reality in 2020, these pseudo attempts evaporated into nothingness. These self made foundations of ‘self’ crumbled, and we wondered why?
Like the neanderthal man, we built up defence mechanism after defence mechanism, possibly forgetting to love and rather entered a ‘flinch status’ of existence, expecting the worst, and then seeing it. This ‘sets you spinning round to grasp uncertainly at any straw that seems to hold some promise of relief. Yet who can build his home upon a straw and count on it as shelter from the wind?’
The body becomes the means of keeping this sense of an insane reality in place, ‘The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight’. We separate further, as if we weren’t far enough from each other already. We adorn our body with comforts, keeping it comfortable and ‘healthy’ in jail, we feed it, we use it as attack, we make sure that the primary defence of space is in place between ‘me’ and ‘you’ and we validate that separation as an excepted social standing. Social distance becomes the norm and we find security in separation. The jailer is jailed.
Faith in separation or is it rather: faith in faithlessness?
‘It is like a house upon a straw. It seems to be quite solid and substantial in itself, but its stability cannot be judged apart from its foundation. If IT RESTS ON STRAWS, there is no need to bar the door and lock the windows and make fast the bolts. The wind will topple it, and rain will come and carry it into oblivion.’ We place our faith in the flawed ‘system’, the fallable body, the constructs of the self. ‘What is the sense of seeking to be safe in what was made for danger and for fear?…. What can be safe which rests upon a shadow? Would you build your home upon what will collapse beneath a feathers weight?’
And there ‘it’ rests, our faith placed in ‘it’, and yet ‘it’ is nothingness, a shadow made by separation and glorified as the victor, the savior, this little pile of dust. How does ‘it’ truly serve you?
For an instant see past ‘it’, be eternal, wholly perfect, forever loving, open the doors and windows to the soul, which feels better? Nothingness does not stand between us and others, there is no gap. And in this instant there is enough of everything.