This week I was challenged to write a few words about holes.
When I think about holes, I think about birth, sex, treasure, mystery and space.
I also think about my work and how the dot can appear as a hole if thought about in 3 dimensions.
I think of Lucio Fontana's punctured artworks and Michael Buthe's white paintings in the Tate.
I think about the creative need to break through the surface sometimes - the impulse to force the eye onto another plane- to offer a physical window to what lies behind or beneath.
I also think about Being John Malkovich and the wormhole behind a filing cabinet in an office space that crosses quantum time and space into John Malkovich’s head.
And the hole that Alice tumbles down in Alice in Wonderland. I think of the feminine, the spiritual, the psychological, the physical, the mystery of the black hole, and its white hole counterpart.
I studied Bladerunner as part of my Film Studies A level. It's a firm favourite, full of esotericism.
Watching Deckard break through the floorboards in the disused building to confront Roy is one of my favourite film scenes.
We are then confronted with this notion of being human and non-human, of real and artificial memory and of bearing witness.
We are forced to question Birth, Life and Death in the penultimate scene - the ultimate mystery, the understanding of which is a hole in our human intellect.
Last Month, the James Webb telescope photographed the biggest supermassive black hole.
Gravity is so strong that light cannot penetrate or bounce off this phenomenon. But what the scientists use as a proof of existence is the energy that surrounds the black hole and implies what can not be seen. The photograph itself isn't actually of the black hole but the movement of dust around the edge.
What's astonishing is this is the oldest black hole ever discovered in the universe, at the centre of a galaxy just 570 million years after the universe began.
White holes are hypothetical objects opposite to black holes.
While black holes pull in all matter and energy, white holes emit new matter and energy.
White holes are thought to be the source of new universes. Not yet proven, but interesting non the less if you believe in balance and time-symmetric theory.
For every action there is a non-action.
This idea of collapse and disappearance into a hole, balanced with creating and emitting from a hole, is the epitome of push and pull.
As an artist, I paint dots, sometimes black and often white. They are the marks that I make to create balance in my own work.
I see these dots as a metaphor for transformation, a symbol of hope and possibility.