and afterwards, a garden

I’ve been thinking about legs and how they’ve been occupying the spaces I make on canvas. I realised they are your legs, mine too — I guess every leg, really. I remember witnessing the changes in your movement, when that inherent knowing — which was so much a part of who you were — began to leave. Some friends, the same friends who have comforted me, guided me, walked with me, have become part of this studio process through body printing. Skin to canvas. The transfer of being from them to you, into image. Legs, arses and arms. They float and hover and rest in this space. These works also contain a lot of wiping back, the physical and the metaphorical. We sometimes lose to gain.

I wander into the garden when I can — when I want to see you, where I know I’ll see you. I always knew you’d become a garden. Parts of it are overgrown - there’s much to do. I look at the things you planted and wonder what you knew that I don’t. There are things I recognise without knowing their names, things I remember without remembering when I learnt them. The hands that made that garden are the same kind of hands that make these paintings.

Towards the end, you reminded me that one day there’d be sunflowers. Hey, did you know that sunflowers follow the sun when they’re young, but when they mature, they generally stop moving and face east? They start to learn where the light returns.

Each day is a new search.

– Tom Polo