Meghan:

I’m so curious about this idea of immersion. You’ve created a space in which the audience can be immersed, but in the process, you were immersed in the act of painting—a new and different practice for you. What did it feel like to immerse yourself in this practice, in your body, to create this, knowing the complementary but different practices in your prior work?

You have to fill in the missing, undigested elements. This created a necessary distance.

Derek:

I’m comfortable in performance. My comfort was and is, to be in space in my body. Literally, performing. I have been pushing back on that over the last ten years of my practice. Now, I’ve removed the visibility of my body from the work. I want to be out of it. Going into this show, I knew that I didn’t want it to be about my body or my biography. This was a challenge because a lot of my thinking on the idea of time is through my relationship to myself, my own body, my son, my father, my family, the land.

So, to pull myself out of a painting, I came to painting from memory. When you’re painting from memory, there is a disconnect. You have to fill in the missing, undigested elements. This created a necessary distance. The embodiment was in the distance found through memory. I was trying to disconnect myself if I felt too close. Maybe embodiment is when something feels right? But is that reflective of expectation? Maybe as an artist, knowing the visceral but striving for something unsettled. I think that is a form of embodiment. Maybe.