tabula rasa

The title references an epistemological theory that supports the nurture side of the nature vs nurture debate within child developmental psychology. it theorises that "human intellect at birth resembles a tabula rasa (clean slate),a pure potentiality."

 

This piece presents to you the mind of a child - a clean slate. The void functions as a background to this piece and highlights the potentiality and the limitlessness of a child's imagination, as there is "freedom is emptiness." The wandering lines emulate the mark-making of a child, and extend beyond the confines of the canvases to the walls to further emphasise the breadth of their ingenue, how their mind is constantly buzzing with new ideas and observations, and how they have little to no awareness of external pressures and expectations that would otherwise impede or constrain them. The representational, academic painting style with which I have used to render the figures in this piece underline the irony of it all, how the project was an endeavour to explore the ways of a child yet it has amounted to my discovery that one cannot unlearn years of classical training and return to the primitive. The den is a familiar childhood memory that we all share, it is a portal to that world, a world full of freedom, curiosity and wonder. However, we observe the child from afar, as she is engrosses in her own activity, oblivious to us, thriving in her own atmosphere. The den itself is inaccessible as it's an image and it is physically impossible to enter it and return to our child selves. Similarly, I am unable to completely grasp the essence that lies within the lines and strokes of a child. Through this realisation, we amass envy towards her unselfconscious naïveté and insouciance that we, once upon a time, all had.

Done