Sea

  Most artists would acknowledge that they are on their own personal journey. Throughout their life and work, there is a continuous searching. More recently, Sax Impey has quite literally been on a voyage and, by the very nature of voyages, it has been one of discovery. His interest in the sea has led, over the last three years, to sail training and subsequently to crewing on yacht deliveries. These have become a regular feature of his life, the most recent a transatlantic crossing this summer.
  These are not frivolous trips, at least not for Sax, for they involve hard physical work, technical expertise and a mental strength that to the lay person would be unimagined.There is a watch system where many nights are spent by the crew looking for anything untoward. Just the endless sea, the sky and the stars are all that the crew have and, of course, their own thoughts. “What I have out there is an immense amount of thinking time where you can’t do anything else,” says Sax. “You can’t be affected by the day–to- day stuff of life, all that has to go because you are unable to do anything about it in that space.” Sax like the other crew members is affected by his tiredness which has the power to distort. “The idea of day and night as a rhythm stops. Everyone becomes very tired and you stop interacting with each other. There is a shared experience; a very singular and slightly edgy one”.
  This sort of experience is life changing and has inevitably had a profound influence on the work that has followed. It hasn’t come out of a conscious desire to find new inspiration. Being alone with himself has given Sax time to confront, question and analyse and so he admits it would be impossible for it to not change the work because “the nature of the experience is so immersive”. So all consuming has this experience been that he uses the word “edgy” to describe the changes in his work. I suspect like all major shifts there must have been fear and at times scary moments along the way but the change would not be so great if that were not true. The experience seems to have been a spiritual one, almost a feeding of Sax’s soul but this is not language with which he is comfortable. His language is one of cosmic matter and of particles.
    "I feel very aware of the fact that the stuff of us is a fleeting arrangement of matter that has come together. Parts, billions of years old, that will go on to form other structures. Consciousness, this particular arrangement, is thinking about itself i.e. me. Whether that consciousness is individual or whether it is the universe thinking about itself that has put this arrangement together, who knows?” Sax believes that it is impossible to not think like this when you are alone at night at sea completely away from any light other than the stars. He tells me about a Large Hadron Collider which is being built in Switzerland, a huge 27 kilometer circumference tunnel to prove the theorem of ‘Higgs boson’. Dave Rainwater, a researcher, says “The Higgs boson is the only reasonable explanation we have for the origin of mass. Without it all fundamental particles would be without mass and the universe would be very different. The elemental composition of the cosmos would be radically different, stars would shine differently and we probably wouldn’t exist”.
    It is not surprising that it has been dubbed the “God Particle” by the Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman who believes it is a particle that bestows mass on all other particles. Sax feels that at their core, the scientists and he himself are still asking the same questions “What am I doing here? Why are we here? So for Sax the interest in science and the cosmos is in a sense a means to an end; a way of getting at the fundamental questions of our existence. Others may seek to answer these questions through theology, philosophy and religion. The journey may be different but the questions will be the same. I am reminded of the first Quakers who were known as “Seekers” because they were seeking a different way and through that seeking a better understanding of the world in which they lived.
  Sax does not have a scientific background and his interest in science is not about transferring his new found knowledge into a pictorial narrative but the asking of these fundamental questions is certainly creating change within the work. A figurative aspect has entered the painting and he says “ I am rediscovering the pencil and going back to something quite basic”. Some of those who have looked at the new work have been surprised by the drawings of the sea but he believes that everything he has ever done has been looking at the natural world. However, he admits that “maybe the things I have chosen to look at in the natural world have not been so readily available to our sight as the sea”. Previously the end result has been more obscure whereas some of this work is a little more overt.
   This exhibition  has the same intensity as previous work. I, like others, marvelled at the dot paintings and the concentration and hours of dedicated labour that would have been required to complete them. To me the process involved felt like a form of meditation but again I don’t think Sax would be happy with the use of that word. The drawings in this show have that same power; a power that seems to emanate from strength of concentration that is either about his passion or perhaps some force beyond himself and therefore cannot be understood. There is one drawing in the exhibition of a tree, lonely in front of an empty sea which is unlikely to exist in nature. If it had been dreamt it would not be surprising. In the tiredness that Sax felt during those long nights he saw a tree. As if it were a waking dream he saw the tree “as simple as that” he says.
  Some of the new work also has resonances with the world of maps and charts, the world of plotting and radar. “ The nuts and bolts of the technicality of sailing even down to the shape the sail takes in the wind”. When looking at these works I am reminded of James Turrells work on Roden Crater in the San Francisco Peaks: the beautiful aerial photographs of the locations with the contours; the working drawings of the site; Turrell’s mathematical calculations; the meticulous drawings and models for the observatory. Each stage is a work of art in its own right, the final climax coming with the photographs of the crater itself. Peter Noever writing in Turrell’s catalogue describes it thus “ as soon as we enter the magic light spaces, as soon as we perceive and experience these unprecedented yet familiar spatial constellations with our body and mind, at the very latest then, if not before, a surprisingly new dimension opens up, a new insight into our existence between the present and the past, between sky and earth.” He goes on to say that “entering these underground, mystery laden chambers of the Roden Crater evokes the feeling of having become the hub of the universe”
  One might think that this amount of introspection could have a negative impact on Sax. On the contrary, he says. “I feel a sense of wonder that I’m here and that there is a mind thinking about itself, where it comes from and how that is possible”. It is this awareness that gives him the energy to create, to go to work everyday. Sax acknowledges that whatever is going on in his head or in his life; whatever changes he makes psychologically or emotionally “on a prosaic level these works are two dimensional objects that have to work on some sort of aesthetic level in order to communicate something”. Clearly at the very least they do that but for me they do much more because they seem to communicate something of what it is to be a human being surviving in this difficult world.

©  David Falconer 2007