A Work of Family

Conceptual art runs deep. While the artist knows she must examine her strategy again next week, a kind of ingrown creativity continues to yearn and promise like a kernel among her offspring. Our son coughs. The desert lamp shines its lamp across the polished bare floorboards in front of the fireplace and unlit candles. In this space come the two large and white cardboard boxes. With one now perpendicular to the fireplace on the floor our son crawls inside it, slowly lifting the other box on top and disappearing. Over and over he does this - it is an open and shut case - hoping someone will notice him, and continuing quietly until they do so. It is like a work of art, a cardboard womb, a fictitious nest, a comic kind of cavity. Eventually I acknowledge to the 5-year-old artist that I see him and soon he is leaning against the back of the bright red sofa like an amateur golfer admiring another person's swing. Then he starts asking questions. Why for example can you not fill the cardboard box with water? He has been skateboarding with his sister today and his cheeks are red as blushing fruit. This afternoon I could see the artist watching him grapple with the gravity and physics of it all and saw her smile when he slipped and fell and immediately screamed out: 'I'm all right!' In some ways our whole lives could be transmuted into a single work of art. Conceptualism may run deep but it also runs through this family like a blog running through a major artist's journey towards fresh recognition. I would say watch this space. But this isn't space. Space suggests something unfilled. This place is jammed to the rafters. And we love it.