I have come to realise that whenever I write a song or create an artwork, I am ultimately revealing something about myself. I have resisted this for much of my life. I have tried to create characters and ideas that could speak for me, allowing them to express things that I was too afraid to say myself or things that were too difficult for me to confront directly. But whenever I do this, something feels false. The work becomes hollow. Eventually, no matter how hard I try to distance myself from the personal, I find myself somewhere inside the work. I am a private person, and the idea of revealing something deeply personal about myself publicly is frightening. Yet I have come to understand that perhaps the things that frighten me most are precisely the things I need to confront.

Carl Jung said, “Where your fear is, there is your task.”

I have begun to understand this not as an instruction to eliminate fear, but as an invitation to move towards it. The things that cause me discomfort are not necessarily obstacles that I should avoid. They can become a kind of compass, pointing towards the places within myself that require attention, honesty and growth. For me, the task is therefore not to avoid the difficult questions, but to remain with them.

THE SEARCH

I was born on 29 December 1970. At this stage of my life, I once imagined that I would have found answers to many of the fundamental questions that have followed me since childhood. I haven't. Instead, I have discovered something more unsettling: the further I search for answers, the more questions I seem to find.

I follow a question believing that it will eventually lead me somewhere definite. I investigate it, think about it, live with it and sometimes believe I have found an answer. But the answer rarely closes the question. Instead, it changes its shape and opens another one. Every answer becomes another question. The further I travel, the larger the circle becomes.

At times this has been deeply frustrating. I have often felt as though I am simply running around in circles — searching, questioning, doubting and returning to the same places without ever reaching a final point. But perhaps I have misunderstood what the circle means. Perhaps the circle does not represent failure. Perhaps it represents the process itself. We return to the same questions throughout our lives, but we are never the same person asking them. The question may remain, but we have changed. What appeared to be an answer at one stage of life may become another question later. Perhaps the purpose of the search is therefore not to arrive at certainty, but to become capable of asking better questions.

There may be no final point. There may only be a continuing movement between certainty and doubt, knowledge and ignorance, fear and courage. This is where Rainer Maria Rilke's advice to “live the questions” has become important to me. Perhaps some questions cannot be answered because they are not problems waiting for solutions. They are experiences that must be lived. The circle is therefore not simply going nowhere. It is the journey.

THE MOUTH

This search for answers found its first physical expression in the mouth fragment and the Circles portrait sculptures. The mouth is significant to me because it is where something internal crosses into the outside world. Through the mouth we speak, question, confess, protest, accuse, comfort and reveal. But we can also remain silent. I am particularly interested in the mouth as a fragment. A fragment is incomplete. It gives us only part of the person and refuses to tell us everything.

That seems appropriate because the things I struggle to express are also incomplete. There are thoughts that exist inside us long before we can find the words to articulate them. There are things we want to say but are afraid to say. There are truths that become more frightening the closer we come to giving them a voice. The mouth therefore becomes both a symbol of speech and a symbol of silence. It represents the moment before something is said, the possibility that something might be said, and the fear that accompanies saying it. For me, sculpture becomes a way of giving physical form to things that I sometimes cannot express through words.

The mouth also raises another question: how much of a person can ever really be revealed through what they say? We speak, but we remain partially concealed. We communicate, but we are never completely understood. Perhaps the mouth fragment represents that incomplete conversation between the inner self and the world outside it. It also represents something deeply personal to me: the struggle to find the courage to say what is important, even when saying it might make me unpopular or uncomfortable in the eyes of others.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF SEEING

These questions about speaking eventually lead me to a much more difficult question: What responsibility do I have towards the evil and suffering I see in the world?

Every day we are exposed to images and stories of human beings suffering at the hands of other human beings. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the scale of it. It happens everywhere, all the time, and the individual can feel powerless in the face of it. Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein both wrote about the danger of passively accepting evil. Their words are powerful, but they also make me uncomfortable because they force the question back onto me.

If I see something terrible and do nothing, what responsibility do I carry? Where does my responsibility begin? Where does it end? Surely I cannot be responsible for confronting every evil in the world. But at what point does helplessness become apathy? At what point does looking away become a form of participation? These are questions I cannot comfortably resolve.

For me, the most horrific examples are those involving innocent and defenceless children — children killed or maimed in war, children sexually abused, exploited and trafficked. The scale of this suffering is almost impossible to comprehend. And yet, beyond the statistics and the enormity of the problem, there remains the individual human being: a child who cannot protect themselves from an adult who chooses to harm them. That raises another question for me: What can one individual human being actually do in the face of something so enormous? I do not pretend that my art can solve these problems. But perhaps art can refuse silence. Perhaps asking a question publicly is itself an act of resistance.

THE SHADOW

This question about evil eventually turns inward. It is relatively easy to recognise evil when we see it in someone else. It is much harder to ask whether some potential for darkness exists within ourselves. What is my own capacity for evil? This is one of the most disturbing questions I have encountered. I want to believe that I am a good person. Most people probably do. We construct an image of ourselves as fundamentally different from those who commit terrible acts. But history makes that belief difficult to maintain.

Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men was particularly disturbing to me because it describes ordinary people becoming participants in extraordinary acts of brutality. The uncomfortable lesson is not that these people were monsters who were fundamentally different from us. It is that under certain circumstances, ordinary human beings can become capable of terrible things. That destroys the comforting idea that evil always looks like evil. It forces me to ask: Could I ever become someone I currently believe I could never become?

I do not ask this because I believe that I am secretly evil. I ask it because I am human. There is something dangerous about believing that we are incapable of darkness. If we refuse to acknowledge our own potential for destructive behaviour, we may become blind to it — both in ourselves and in others.

This is where Jung's idea of the shadow becomes important to me. The shadow consists of those parts of ourselves that we do not want to acknowledge. The parts that conflict with the image we have constructed of ourselves. Perhaps genuine self-knowledge requires more than discovering the qualities we like about ourselves. Perhaps it requires us to look at the qualities we desperately hope are not there. This is why the idea of the shadow is so frightening. It challenges the boundary between “me” and “the kind of person I could never be.”

NO KNOW NO MORE

These thoughts found creative expression in my No Know No More sculptures. The title expresses something I feel very strongly: I don't want to know any more. I do not want to look further into myself and discover what else might be there. I do not want to discover another uncomfortable possibility about my own nature. And yet, the very act of creating these sculptures means that I am looking. There is a contradiction at the centre of the work.

I want self-knowledge. But I am afraid of what self-knowledge might reveal. Perhaps this is the paradox of the shadow: the things we most need to understand about ourselves are often the things we most strongly resist seeing. The more I try to understand human malevolence, the more I am forced to acknowledge that it is not something entirely external to humanity. It exists within the human potential. And therefore, it exists within me as a possibility. That is deeply uncomfortable. But it is necessary to acknowledge this possibility.

GOOD AND EVIL

Once the question of evil becomes personal, another series of questions follows naturally. What is evil? What is good? Is there an absolute distinction between the two? If there is an objective moral order, where does it come from? And if there is not, who decides what is right and wrong? These questions lead me inevitably towards the question of God. Does God exist? If God exists, why does he allow human beings to commit horrific acts against one another? If God does not exist, where does our sense of morality come from?

There are highly intelligent people who believe in the existence of God and there are equally intelligent people who are atheists. Each side making seemingly very convincing arguments to justify their personal beliefs. I do not pretend to possess the philosophical or theological knowledge necessary to resolve them. I am not trying to provide an answer. I am trying to understand what happens to a person when certainty disappears. One man's God can become another man's Devil. One person's sin can become another person's freedom. One person's idea of justice can become another person's oppression. This makes me question the foundations upon which I have built my own understanding of good and evil.

Perhaps the most difficult question is not simply “What is evil?” Perhaps it is: “How do I know that I am on the side of good?” And perhaps even more unsettling: “How much of my belief in my own goodness depends upon never having to test it?”

THE MASK

At this point the questions move from morality into identity. I live behind a mask. The mask represents the parts of myself that I choose to hide from other people, but also the parts of myself that I have hidden from myself. We all construct versions of ourselves. We learn what can be said and what should remain private. We learn what is acceptable, what is expected of us and what parts of ourselves are easier for other people to accept.

At first, the mask may be something we consciously create. But what happens when we wear it for long enough? Eventually it can become so familiar that we no longer experience it as a mask. We may even begin to believe that it is our true face. That is perhaps the most frightening aspect of concealment. The danger is not only that other people might mistake the mask for the person. The danger is that the person wearing it might make the same mistake. The mask then becomes more than concealment. It becomes identity.

And this creates another internal conflict. One part of me wants to remain hidden. Another part desperately wants to reveal what is hidden. One part wants privacy and silence. Another wants freedom and to be revealed. One part fears judgement. Another fears the consequences of continued silence. The more I conceal, the more difficult disclosure becomes. Yet there is also something liberating about the possibility of finally saying what has been kept hidden.

The question becomes: What would happen if I finally removed the mask? And perhaps an even more difficult question: Who would I discover underneath it?

THE MASK AND THE MOUTH

The mouth and the mask therefore represent opposing movements within the same person. The mouth wants to reveal. The mask wants to conceal. The mouth wants to speak. The mask wants to remain silent. One reaches outward. The other turns inward. And yet both come from the same place — the private interior of the individual. This tension between speaking and silence, revelation and concealment, is central to my work.

There are things I want to say but cannot say. There are things I can say but choose not to say. There are things I have hidden for so long that I no longer know whether I am choosing to hide them. The mouth asks for expression. The mask offers protection. Neither is entirely right or entirely wrong. Perhaps both are necessary. Perhaps the problem begins when protection becomes imprisonment.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

This conflict ultimately finds expression in A House Divided. I have described myself as a house divided against itself — continually trying, but often failing, to reconcile opposing parts of myself. The house becomes a metaphor for the human psyche. A house contains rooms. Some rooms are open and lived in every day. Others are locked. Some contain memories we cherish. Others contain things we are ashamed of, afraid of or unwilling to revisit. There may even be rooms whose existence we have almost forgotten. We decide which rooms other people are allowed to enter. We decide which doors remain closed. But the fact that a room is locked does not mean that what is inside it ceases to exist.

Perhaps the human being is much like this. We contain contradictions. We can be compassionate and cruel, courageous and cowardly, generous and selfish, loving and destructive. We can believe deeply in goodness while still carrying the capacity to do harm. We can want to reveal ourselves while desperately wanting to remain hidden. We can search for truth while simultaneously protecting ourselves from what that truth might reveal. The divided house therefore represents more than indecision. It represents the experience of being internally divided between different versions of ourselves.

One part wants to know. Another does not want to know. One wants to speak. Another wants silence. One wants to reveal. Another wants concealment. One wants certainty. Another recognises that certainty may be impossible.

BECOMING WHOLE

Perhaps becoming whole does not mean eliminating these contradictions. Perhaps it means having the courage to acknowledge them. To enter every room of the house. To look at the things we have hidden. To recognise the mask without pretending it was never there. To acknowledge the shadow without allowing it to define us.

To speak when something needs to be spoken. To remain silent when silence is necessary. To accept that some questions may never have satisfactory answers. Perhaps wholeness is not the absence of contradiction. Perhaps it is the ability to live honestly with contradiction.

THE CIRCLE CONTINUES

I originally thought that with enough time I would eventually arrive at answers to the questions that have followed me throughout my life. Instead, I have discovered that the questions become larger. The search changes me. The answers change the questions. The questions lead to other questions.

The mouth becomes a question about speaking. Speaking becomes a question about silence. Silence becomes a question about concealment. Concealment becomes a question about identity. Identity becomes a question about what I know about myself. Self-knowledge leads to the shadow. The shadow leads to questions about good and evil. Good and evil lead to questions about God, morality and responsibility. And these questions eventually bring me back to myself.

Back to the beginning. Back to the circle. Perhaps this is ultimately what my work is about. Not answers. But the courage to remain inside the question and live the answers.

The sculptures are physical manifestations of questions that I cannot resolve through words. They are attempts to give form to uncertainty, fear, silence, contradiction, morality, identity and the parts of myself that I struggle to understand. I do not make these works because I have found the answers. I make them because I have not.

Perhaps the role of the artist is not to tell another person what to believe, but to have the courage to stand openly inside the questions that frighten him most. The work remains unresolved because I remain unresolved. The circle continues.