Come Out, Of Things Unsaid

This piece has to do with memory and thought: how they work, and how we treat them. The image I’m using for this piece is a sea; that’s one way I feel our minds and memories are like. We usually operate on the surface of our minds, which consists of all the current things that occupy our thoughts at any given moment, but without much thought to the things that linger below.

Many people have had many ideas, regrets, outrageous notions, and flashes of short-lived inspiration, but most of them we just push down to sink into the depths of our mind, where they lie, decaying and ignored, but still there, in our subconscious. We come up with ideas but dismiss them for different reasons–thinking that they are too silly, too outrageous, that friends would laugh at it, but the bulk of everything that we have ever seen and thought lies somewhere in this subconscious place of half-forgotten images.

However, I believe that that is also where many of our most original and creative ideas and solutions to problems come from, and this is exactly where the Surrealists, having discovered Freud, were trying to access with their dream-centric, dream-inspired paintings and seemingly nonsense stream-of-consciousness poems. My picture definitely has some Surrealist influence in the bizarre diver figure, which represents an outrageous idea that has been discarded to the bottom of the sea and has been left to decay. Several bits of debris float around it, representing the other bits of memories and ideas that have also made their way down, all but forgotten. Despite this, some of it has managed to float up to the surface where it can be retrieved, even if it’s only partially. Even though it’s our instinct to suppress the spontaneous ideas and aspirations that we have, they never go away completely, and we still can get them back and maybe even fulfill them if we make an effort to think below the surface.

The title comes from the song “Clocks” by Coldplay, which I personally consider to be surreal, as it is made up entirely of seemingly unrelated, dreamlike images, dripping with ambiguity and therefore wide open to personal interpretation: “Come out of things unsaid/Shoot an apple off my head/ And a trouble that can’t be named/A tiger’s waiting to be tamed.”