When M. and I dipped into (mentally skipped into) Hilma af Klint’s Painting the Unseen we found work created a hundred years ago, modern, radical, mysterious; rooted in the artist’s day, and, via the sixties (science and séances meet flower power), easily at home in ours. Time turns, throws slings around ideas, ever restless, ever green.
My impulse is to stop, look closely; sorrow tugs at fleeting glances. In my favourite room I lay on a bench, brimful with the potency of art. Eyes binged, as if they’d been shut in the box with rings I never wear. In poured the cycles of life, rendered in radiant colour. A polyphony of cells dividing, merging, multiplying, of blossoms, spirals, hieroglyphs. Vitality’s groundwork visualised, this side of strife, greed, power over. Whatever we may call it, life force, biology, mysticism, af Klint conjures boundless joy: life is.
When limbs, sight, mind are overwhelmed by tiredness, when I cannot do, I sometimes wonder: is being enough? No answers at the Serpentine, but a sense of fluid processes, continuous unfolding, and a realisation how much this wondrous bottom line needs tending.