My Life In Post-it Notes

Note: This essay accompanies my Post-it Note Artwork, which forms a part of my ‘Identity Art’ Series.

Maybe Post-it notes are the office equivalent of the artists canvas, maybe the 76mm square area is like a window to the soul, maybe it’s just paper and adhesive without context and without hope. Isn’t it strange how a piece of paper can achieve so much significance with the marks of the artists hand. likewise the dreams we leave playing on ours pillows each morning, often go unnoticed if not mocked as our conditioned adult filters take excruciating care in not allowing us to act childish, an irony, when we consider the truest demonstration of life is only found in the most childish of things.

The innocence of a flippant doodle, an unconscious externalisation of the telephone call about nothing in particular. we bore ourselves to death, quite literally, by trusting 700 page reports rather than our intuitive mind, honed and developed over thousands of years so that we can disregard it’s communication as irrelevant. It is our filters which are irrelevant when they go beyond a useful limiting of external stimulus, we overuse them to actually believe that reality is what we see, hear and feel. This is the grandest of misunderstandings, that we, such an advanced civilisation trust in no-one but our own filtering of media filtered junk. No, this cannot be happening!

I take my post-it note and draw until understanding arises, I expect the unexpected, and believe in and trust it’s ‘childish’ games. To you it may be a square of coloured paper, to me it’s the door to another world.

Like the Steppenwolf of Hesse, who found himself walking endless corridors in search of the one thing he did not understand, I flick through post-its searching for a link I cannot comprehend. They flicker by like yesterdays sunset played on fast forward, looping recursively, without beginning and without end. I used to wonder whether the images in my mind were real, whether a cube after a cube could relate to my living room floor, or walls, or doors. I kept on drawing those lines, hoping for salvation from a compartmental life, the pages keep on, image after image, when suddenly, the letters ‘you wish you were you’ flashed like lightening across the darkest of skies. Each letter embedding itself firmly within the conical receptors of my eyes, etched for a lifetime, a permanent reminder that I had been searching for meaning, when it was the process of searching that was the meaning all along.

John Lennon once said that ‘life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans’, maybe this procession of images is the externalisation of life, happening, in front of our very eyes, maybe you’ll still search for meaning, making your plans, whilst another fragment of my life passes you by, maybe you’ll stop and wonder what it was like to be a child.

(2006)