La Romita School of Art hosted a one day event within the grounds of their beautiful monastery with the aim of making fashion, art and music come together. As one of the invited artist to bring art within this spiritual location, I presented a new series of seven paintings called Suns to be hung outdoors, overlooking the gardens of the church. Suns is as series dedicated to the observation of different stages of the sun and the manner in which they dictate our lives. It points out the disorienting experience one lives when they try to look directly at it. Our most important source of life is so extraordinary we do not have the ability to even look at it.
The live performance I Stop When You Stop, which had a duration of thirty minutes, was staged inside the church as models and viewers walked through to reach the monastery’s gardens. This performance involved drawing a continuous circle on a raw canvas with a piece of charcoal. This action is about finding a connection with spirituality through a rhythm found both by the body through the repetitive act of drawing a circle, and the mind through the noise of the canvas being drawn upon. I Stop When You Stop evokes the Japanese symbol called Ensō. This symbol of the circle can be associated with multiple meanings at once, including: the beginning and end of things, the connectedness to existence, empty or fullness and absence or presence. All things can be contained in it or, in contrast, excluded by its boundaries. I Stop When You Stop shows physicality through the use of charcoal and raw canvas which consequently raise a hypnotic atmosphere.
