Lightning and My Cloud
Interests in lightning and the partially articulated
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I’ve had a fascination with thunder and lightning for a while: A connection from above to below, a source through the sky, a route. Rapid movement. On my 19th birthday, I went for a walk over the fields. It was misty when we left the house, but by about 20 minutes into the walk, the weather had turned stormy – heavy hail and lightning that felt immediately nearby. It was the first time I’d felt the potential danger of a storm, and we left to run home.
Rowan Briggs Smith, detail of in-progress painting
Lightning makes me think about verticality, the parallel, conducting from the sky like a puppet master’s strings, and visible plumb lines in drawings and paintings. I imagine suspensions through the sky, secrets and knowledge layered and stacked vertically through time and space. Things that aren’t visible but that move upwards and downwards, and perhaps disappear into the ground. Alongside my interest in lightning, this past year, especially, I’ve found myself attracted to bodies of water. I’m not very water-inclined as a person, but I often find I can’t look away. There’s something about the idea of being submerged in water and therefore suspended, but that without that actually happening to me, my mind is left in this state of imagining and filling in, or jumping over, the gaps in what that would feel like.
