Artists Statement:

This image has been haunting my art for a year and my understanding of it has grown.

It has taken two repeated elements in my work and developed meaning for me. The suitcase aka the Baggage Handler and the balloon, unsurprisingly from the “Balloonist”

It describes a way to consider the essential elements of a being, a kind of metaphysical anatomy.

The Suitcase being the container of memories, not in the sense of being a physical location but as an idea. We have infinite types of memory, not attempting to be clinically correct or categorically consistent. Memories can be pictorial, aural, muscle memory, libraries, footprints, other people’s thoughts, ancestral memory, fossils, everything on the internet and James Webb images from the edge of the universe, old houses and so on. Truths and falsities.
The balloon is will and desire. We cannot exist without will and desire except in some kind of enlightenment, which I am not up for.
The string is the middle bit and the knot in the string is our silent seat of being, our consciousness our mystery. The unexaminable and that might be described as the Liminal.

No part of this structure is static, even consciousness is a verb.

People may well get themselves and their memories confused, or get themselves and their actions confused (become their work).