On Transformation

I have lived with the velocity of a hypnotist’s wheel that seems to whirl even when it’s at rest. There was a time when I preferred flowing things — things that were translucent, bared no weight, hard to pin down, too quick for the shutter of a camera to fix its gaze. Stillness was not a comfortable place to rest.

It was this fear of stillness that led me to move through the world seeking, gathering each new experience as a bounty, emblems of the huntress, prey of the pleasure seeker. Feelings and memories became immortalised and hung on the walls of my mind like taxidermy — immutable — poised for a forward motion that would never occur.

Stillness — my biggest fear — became my biggest teacher. Stillness points to meaning through wordlessness, timelessness. It points to immensity through the simple and intimate act of being and not doing. It asks us to abandon the stuff of personality in order to look deeply at the world. It is the feeling of being grasped, held, lifted to the mouth of a moment.

In this moment, there is a distance that allows us to be both here and gone, something and nothing at once. The material details of experience become capable of dissolution, shrinking into the background. In stillness, we become moments of attention, moving away from the outward-flying focus that binds us so closely to the world.

But desire always brings us back, the urge to enter the senses — the exuberant smell of perfume, the feeling of silk, sensations strong enough to make one feel as though they are submerged in water — but just as easily as it comes, pleasure vanishes in the slipstream of time.

Stillness is a place one can return to. The pleasure of a still life is realised when the dark space within begins to feel like an embrace, and loneliness no longer pervades one’s solitude. The oil colours of this internal canvas are thick and porous, and with the right attention, they can stand the test of time.

Stillness transforms into a work of art, a masterpiece in the museum of one’s life. Stillness is a familiar place that resides somewhere closer to eternity than reality. The still life is a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it. The still life, in some morbid and enchanting way, is a necessary preparation for death — it lights the way across that seemingly vast bridge between this lifetime and the next.


Words & Photography
Shannon May Powell