Je vois bien le bleu
Being in the landscape always seems to affect me in ways I could never imagine. Certain places or encounters creep into my life and simmer away in obsession. ‘Je vois bien le bleu’ is the tale of such a moment, inspired by a chance encounter.
Blue has always been a presence in my life but only on one particular day had I started to ask myself why. While running in the mountains, I crossed paths twice with an elderly blind man on the way to the same bridge. After stopping briefly to share our stories, I began to move away and he called out, ‘Je vois bien le bleu’ (I see blue well). All he could see of me was the colour of my top.
His words continue to echo through my mind over the course of the years. These echoes and obsessions take their form in the various ways I have tried to picture the encounter and find meaning. In my research, I found two concepts that seemed to want to come together. Carl Jung describes synchronicity as meaningful occurrences that seem to be ‘a falling together in time’ rather than due to cause and effect. A strange moment of clarity in the normal chaos of life. Quantum entanglement is when two different particles become linked and act as such even when apart. Once connected they are never fully separate from each other.
And so, this project is about the traces we leave on each other. It is about human connection and how we search for meaning in places and events.