A world reconstituted

It’s no secret that we live among the scattered pieces of a shattered mirror formerly known as reality. We are left with the both haphazard and tedious endeavor of making sense, some sort of sense, of the shiny little pieces. If we understand aesthetic knowledge as the only possible way to try to comprehend as a whole, albeit if ephemerally, this large pile of debris, we must acknowledge that Judy McCaig’s recent work is getting very close. For her work not only offers a one-way reconstitution of the long lost, coherent world, but gives the viewer a chance to fill the gap with a personal experience. It’s not a matter of beauty, or of seeing the flowers in the garbage. It’s a matter of necessity. Of setting in motion an operative gesture that is at the same time action, reaction and concoction. It’s not a matter of objet trouvé or mere gestuality imposed on material, but rather a much more sophisticated, nuanced and sensitive approach to context. For this is McCaig’s work: a reflection on our context, on how it shapes our emotions, and on how we, in our turn, change it to best accommodate in it our erratic, helpless existence. It is the primary act of inhabitation.

Enric Massip-Bosch