"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." — Hamlet, 1.5.167-8

I have been painting the space between heaven and earth my entire career. I only recently understood that there is no space between them. They are the same thing, seen from different angles.

We look up and call it sky. We look down into a puddle after rain and it is still sky, inverted and complete beneath our feet. Up and down lose their authority. The horizon, which we use to tell ourselves where we are, turns out to be a convenience rather than a fact. Between heaven and earth is not a distance. It is a condition. And we are not standing at the boundary between them. We are the boundary. We are made of the same material as everything we are looking at, and it is looking back.

This is the territory these paintings occupy. Not landscape. Not sky. Not earth. The charged, permeable middle ground where all three are the same thing and the human being standing inside them discovers there is no outside.

The paintings have no declared horizon. No physical reference to anchor you in the known world. That is deliberate. Without a horizon you must find your own gravity. Someone stands in front of these paintings and feels pulled upward. Someone else feels they are looking down into depth. A third person feels suspended between the two, neither rising nor falling, held in the particular stillness of a world that has stopped pretending to have edges. All three are right. All three are feeling the same thing from where they stand.

Meaning in this work is buried the way a name is buried on the tip of the tongue, the way a memory arrives as sensation before it arrives as thought. The paintings are built layer upon layer, translucent washes over scumbled grounds, graphite and oil and acrylic and cast-off materials pressed into surfaces that hold time inside them the way sediment holds the record of weather. Sometimes figures appear, uninvited and not quite human, standing at the threshold of what paint can hold before it becomes something else. I do not place them. They arrive. I have learned to leave them alone.

The universe is indifferent. Not cruel, indifferent. It does not know your name. It does not track your losses. It simply generates, endlessly, without preference, chaos as the fundamental creative force, the engine beneath everything that exists. We are that chaos, embodied. Walking around in it, made of it, standing in a puddle after rain discovering that the sky is beneath our feet and we are made of the same light as everything we thought we were looking at.

What I am after is the feeling of awe that arrives when the world suddenly exceeds the frame you have built for it. That moment when something opens up beneath the ordinary and you understand, briefly and completely, that you are not separate from any of it. You are it. The sky above and the sky in the puddle and the body standing between them, all lit from the same source, all made of the same light.

Lit from the inside-out. That is still the most honest thing I know how to say about this work.

Stephanie Visser