Why I Made “Moontomballoon”
I’ve spoken in my other More Than Glass essays about this picture and how it underpinned mine:
…so I won’t rehearse all that here; although I suppose it’s odd not to when it’s the skull of de Champaigne’s Still Life With Skull that most obviously shadows through the palimpsest scribble I did on top of it.
Which might be the reason why I hid it.
Or at least one of the reasons why I hid it.
But then, the skull always hides.
It hides beneath the skin, most obviously: our own personal memento mori that appears, and appears, and appears, with inexorably and alarmingly increasing definition, every time we look in a mirror.
It hides here in the moon, and in a balloon too.
I worked with de Champaigne’s original skull, using AI mapping and alteration by hand to allow the layer to be read as a skull, the moon or a balloon, depending on your perspective.
Well, kind of…
The moon governs the months and monthly cycles that dominate so much of time on a human scale, and yet the lunar year is hard to reconcile with the cold mathematical metrics of the solar year or the intervals I referred to in “The Plank Planck”.
The balloon is christenings, weddings, the events of our lives.
Oh, and the skull represents the tomb. Death.
This is time on the human scale.
So, as I say, you are free to read the image as a skull- representing the certainty of death as the only human absolute- if that’s your perspective.
Or your perspective could be that love is stronger than death, as Elizabeth Smart argued: in which case “The @ Clock”, which celebrates the chance acts of love that give life meaning, does not overlay “Moontomballoon”: it obliterates it, defeats it, destroys it. Or, I suppose, whatever layer is in the position of “The @ Clock” defeats and destroys it just as well. Digs the skull right out of the picture. It’s the moon. Or a balloon. Not the tomb. Love is stronger than death.
So, as I say, you are free to read the image as a moon or a balloon if that’s your perspective.
Well, kind of…
