Aidon Westcott

Artist Biography

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Aidon Westcott is a South African painter and collage maker. The layers of ephemera in his works evoke so many pasts and multiverses and the fish symbol floats serenely through them all linking them and us to a collective consciousness.

“The past is entombed in the present; the world is its own enduring monument; and that which is true of its physical is likewise true of its mental career.” – Joseph Rodes Buchanan 1842. L. P. Hartley said, ‘The past is a foreign country and they do things differently there.’ I would add that it is time to renew our passports. The exhibition Psychometry revisits found objects and various materials of a former time period. The fish that so often appears in his works, symbolize the psyche and represent a deep inner reality, rather than an exterior reality. They are the representatives and messengers of truth. They are the products of emotion and intuition in contrast with the purely materialistic earthbound approach. A metaphor for the aesthetic and spiritual significance, hidden in nature and human beings.

The fish symbol, therefore, becomes productive of the human predicament, depicting patterns of the psyche in the cycle of life. The mixed media objects represent the human imprint left behind; the remains of a past broken down system or culture. These materials carry a reality of their own, which owe their presence to human action and purpose. They are deeply rooted in human consciousness. Every inanimate object around us has absorbed, and still contains, decades or even centuries of the sum of all living energy with which it has come into contact. Objects possess an inner or psychological life which enables the object to receive from and transmit impressions or events connected with which they have come into close contact.

The signatures on these objects are imprinted on the subconscious and transferred to the conscious mind… Psychometry is the ability to sense and interpret this living energy that’s been absorbed by inanimate objects. The artworks therefore aim to provide a platform or a gateway for the conscious and subconscious mind to meet with the goal of uniting the soul.