870 x 730 mm
As you are my dreamtime
So I’ll be your days …
I made this after my first visit to India, aboard Swan Hellenic’s M/V Minerva, calling at such destinations as The Andaman Islands, Chennai (Madras), Cochin, Mangalore, Mumbai (Bombay), Porbandor … I especially remember the dreamlike quality of the heat-heavy, dusty courtyard of the royal palace in the fortress city of Buj, a place that was within a very short time to suffer so cruelly in a catastrophic earthquake.
It is the combination of elements I used to construct the borders which has most to do with that visit to India, the sun rising and setting above and beneath the turrets and oriols. I sensed a wonderful feeling of peace as we made our visits, hence the doves and the bubbles of thought and reflection which ascend through the words as the day dawns, heats up and then cools down at sunset, the warm air fanned by the wings of butterflies. It’s a pattern and a scene that has been repeated, more or less, for six thousand years. It was with the structure of the words that I went awry. Not the content; I like the sentiment very much and it is most appropriate but I am disappointed by the way I worked and designed the letters.
The title comes because I see relationships – well, mine – as a kind of deal. A bargain. Two unequal halves struggling for space in the pre-ordained whole. Fluid. Changing. Necessitating.
The jagged toothed borders on the right and left were supposed to be representations of the snowcapped mountain ranges which guard the sub-continent on its northern frontiers, the sunrise/sunset behind them. As I write this on Boxing Day 2006, I am looking forward to another voyage to India and wondering what will there be?
Panel made up by Yours and His Truly.