For as long as I remember I’ve been drawn to things like parts and categories.

The earliest recollection dates back to me being around 8 and getting a boxed children’s encyclopedia.

I don’t remember how it was structured – alphabetically or using some methodology such as art, science, geography etc. I do emotionally recall there was a system at play and that this felt acceptable and right.

Over 40 years later I am aware that such systems and structuring of information is often arbitrary and sometimes / often even agenda-filled – period of time’s use of structure to feed in this or that view / ideology – which is what we become aware of when certain words / phrases become ‘outlawed’ – and this is not only about political correctness but also simply about the foibles of taste and fashion in terms of ‘in’ and ‘out’.

Part of me has always instinctively rebelled against categorization, against drawers (and being put into them). Yet another part of me has embraced this – manifesting itself in stuff like titles (for pictures and poems), in making lists, in collecting .

My interplay with a belief that time does not exist and a grudging recognition of its presence is still underway. In my 20s fragments were very important to me and this, in a sense, was a reflection of a problematic relationship with order / structure, chronology / the linear – even an intuitive distrust of anything that sought to bring neatness and order to chaos.

Now I embark on a project that seeks to categorize phases of life. A project that breaks itself into parts / sections. A project that Insinuates a presence on a spinning piece of matter in a universe that mocks both science and religion can be given structure in the sense of beginnings and ends – lacks a phrase to mirror ‘re-birth’. Perhaps I should have included ‘pre-birth’ but I forgot to and it doesn’t feel the same anyway. However – it belongs to creation in the sense of presence is as much defined by absence – now is defined by not now … and fragments – defined by a puzzle completed.

Someone I once knew and who termed himself a ‘materialist’ took understandable exception to the terminology of Parts in this project. They could not understand how I / the project could present itself so. I actually feel they have a valid point and it made me re-reflect on this.

I am in the process of this and perhaps – in truth – that is also what this project is about as well. To reflect on fragments and what this means for us.

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”

Carl Gustav Jung