Between One and Twenty

To consume a space, to take up volume, to exist. Between One and Twenty is born out of the interest in playfully showing the act of intimately questioning my self and leaving the questions to be read by another. There is a quality to investigating one’s own being and allowing it to be seen in half-coherent, puzzle-like pieces. The dough–made of salt, flour, oil and water–is soft, malleable, impressionable, absorptive and fragile even. This homemade salty playdough is mine. The making, kneading, adjusting and coloring of the playdough is all mine. Attachment, the absence of transitional space, and the departure of childhood lead me to understand the term existential–often used in psychoanalytic theories–as a way of proving qualities that provide safety, a way of exerting control, and a metaphor for coping with absence. I get caught in a loop reminiscent of the loop inside of my head. Yet, these thoughts are released and justified in my salty playdough. I repeat act, sound and mark over and over again, just for the sake of acknowledging its reality. The carbon blue is confined to the particles at the surface of the dry salty playdough. Apparently permanent but not entirely embedded, revisited but not resolved nor answered, repeated, satiated.