Tom Lines – Embodied Mind
Naturally, as someone which a thinking brain, the theme of the mind interests me greatly. As my work comes from a personal place, it deals with my own mental state: my anxieties, my depressions and boredom. My work also deals more conceptually with the mind’s relationship to the body.
Humans tend to have a strange relationship to their bodies, acting like they are intrinsically separate to the mind, beneath it even. My writing and painting aims to show the mind as inextricably linked to the body. I also explore how the body undermines our conception as the mind as stable and rational in its instability.
Plastic Sandpit
That cracked plastic sandpit.
I remember it overexposed and flightily. As a toddler I would dig around in that blue tub, shaping the patch of loose earth around me. Now, in temporary spaces, I spread myself across the walls for the moment, struggling to define myself against my setting.
If I keep hold of it, it might be mine. But I find myself on the margins, grasping. However poorly, I want to take control of this space. I place objects down to form connections. I make them promises.
Twisting my attention between,
I play in my own mess
A sandpit on the edge of a garden
—
Porous Bodies
A cramped space.
Treacly dense, slipped down. Ingested.
Flush silken walls like plush purple cushions line a pulsing interior.
There
it swims with smooth chaos, its back taut with surface tension, it squeezes,,, squeezes,,, squeezes, and slips through these tightly held passageways.
In a sparse and regular cycle he passes it back and forth;
sucking — breathing — sniffing — sneezing — eating — speaking,
probing with tongues, throwing out, taking in, then his breath held.
He passes it; put out of mind.
This checkpoint between his inside and out is a sour joke, bypassed; a thousand breaches to his unstable surface. This flesh toll pokes holes and tears leaks, permeating and rounding his details down; a rain-bitten figure eroded to its vague and purest form.
His mind slips like a double exposure across his now indistinct body.
Words fail him.
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Find Tom here: instagram.com/_tomlines
