For those of a religious persuasion ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’, for the rest of us it breaks down to something more mundanely unfathomable, a catch 22 scenario, a cage of mortality where limitations are abound. The challenge is to surpass them, break boundaries of both reality and possibility. However one aspect of our shared existence will inevitably bear down on the greatest of minds, the strongest will, the mightiest of forms, and that is mortality. Death to the old flesh, long live the new, hail the cage and idealise the frame within which each of our potentially infinite imaginations dwell, for without transport all enquiry and all thought ceases to be. The moment the brain fails and the body dies, life ends.
Mankind immemorial, through succession of one life after another, has strived to reach beyond his own physical limitations, through invention, technology, self-mutilation, literature, art, chemistry, experientially, practically and philosophically we as a race are aware of our brief existence on this earth, we understand the limitations of our bodies, yet we as a society continually seek to redress the balance against Mother Nature in our favour.
Buddhism proposes the endlessness of the Here and Now, futurists focus on the possibilities of what might be through the dissemination of what is and has been. Much of popular culture takes a more literal view, inviting speculation on the parameters of acceptable mutation and mutilation such as plastic surgery, body building, piercings and tattoos, accepting our temporal limitations whilst proposing new avenues of form, whilst the media and science emblazon the ideals of longevity with an almost religious zeal. Those who trade in speculation of what is to come create literature, film, art that can transpose the qualities of the comparable infinite on to the mortal frames of the highly efficient mechanism that is the human body. On many levels man can surpass the framework of reality, of mortal existence, the confines of the anima and the carbon-based slice of the universe we maintain to be truth, however he cannot out think or out do the cruel truth of life.
We each posses an incredible store of electro-chemical energy, many religions view this as an essential ingredient to a possible post-human metamorphosis, the continuation of consciousness beyond the physical realm, the chance through belief to reach beyond our limited sphere of existence, to pass on into the womb of the universe, where all thought and feeling can merge with a greater power. Yet for many, life is what you see, hear, feel, and think, that which one witnesses around oneself, birth, death, pain, disease, these cruel aspects of the human experience all inevitably ’seal the deal’, ensuring that even the youngest minds must on some level, even if it is merely instinctual, understand that we all die. We share an understanding that we are more than our mere physical form. An ideology tested by the resultant internal physiological interactions that conspire within this cage of flesh, instituting a realm of connective logic that will nevertheless witness our own demise. For each and every one of us, no matter what we or society considers our achievements or contributions to the progression of the success of the human race, will succumb.
Sam Jinks is very well aware of our limitations, to be human is to be flawed, to be alive is to be vulnerable to pain and death, his silicon-based representations of a form most familiar invokes a schismatic array of emotional and intellectual responses and repressions. Witnessing both the frailty of life and the moment of death, the humility of our true position in the order of things, the ultimate truth that each of us is fundamentally alone, and have both arrived and will depart this plane of existence with little more knowledge of that greater scheme of the infinite. Eventually, through a didactic logic, the distance between the representative and the actual is encouraged to falter, cushioning us from the blow, enabling us to seek and justify a purpose for existence.
Subject matter and context are Jinks’ allies, an Australian sculptor working with base materials such as silicon, paint and human hair, his creations lack nothing but the ‘breath of life’ in their representation of the body, unlike many similar works, those venerating celebrities past and present, the tradition of ‘wax works’, his figures commemorate a greater accomplishment in nature. The passage of life.
Hyperrealism lacks the truth – the aggregate of imperfections with which we subconsciously register signifiers of the natural, of the living, and even the dead – which are exposed within each of Jinks’ painfully natural pieces. The flaws offer an inexorable truth, that from the moment we are born we begin, at least in our physicality, to die. This vulnerability of a species, with a shared intellect and philosophy unbound by those same natural laws, still accepts, despite numerous spiritual obfuscations, that this truth can never be shorn, can never be exiled to the past. The end is the future, the degradation of existence is our manifest destiny, and without the temperance of mortality, we may have never even attained consciousness in the first place.
Bar a freak development of the Pineal gland, there is little for any extraterrestrial to separate us from all other creatures of the earth, physically we are a weak and inefficient development in the timeline of evolution. What we are, as a race, is what we project, we clothe ourselves, paint ourselves, build one exoskeleton after another, be it a home, a car, a craft to repel the gravitational field of our planet, a cocoon, an artificial womb within which we can attain god-like achievements. A name, a title, a profession, proof of advanced intellect or education, a demeanour, skill or persona, can all too detract from the mind numbingly generic similarities between one individual and another.
Many, instinctively believe that through their progeny they can outlive their own existence, fewer both believe and act on the creation of many different forms of art to serve the same purpose, Sam Jinks performs the latter, almost in an attempt to disprove the first.
Man is truly alone, both collectively and as individuals. We enter this mysterious space and leave it without fail, it is simply how we reflect those around us, how our actions adapt the perceptions and actions of all others, this is our legacy. We live in a world of body consciousness, body politic, yet ironically we have taken millions of years to evolve to the state where we are able to make these cultural choices, if we continue to exist as a race we may finally surpass physicality, envelope our own destiny as electrochemical beings, unbound by the cancerous mal-efficiency of the evolution of man. Until then, witness our limitations in the harsh light of a biological truth. Inspect the tinkerings of a formula of the gods, a process of unending trial and tribulation that has resulted in one being attempting to communicate to another before their inevitable demise at www.SamJinks.com.
Tags: art, baby, figurative, realistic, Sam Jinks, sculptor, sculpture, silicon sculpture, silicone, the hanging man
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