‘I’m not human anymore’ (2024/25, mixed media on paper, 140x100cm)
I am genuinely incredibly happy with this work. Yet, it feels tiny, no matter how big I made it and how shoulder injuries I get making it, the work feels smaller and smaller.
My vision no longer has eyes, not in quite the same way as it once did.
Things have changed. Whilst I was foolish (perhaps) for believing in a different kind of change.
Foolish (perhaps?) to have allowed myself to be a host for a millenarian kind of faith – a millennial who thought it inevitable that the transition from the 20th to 21st century would unveil a better/more liveable world.
Foolish (perhaps?), like millions of others, to have made a b-line to a beam of light, an opening to the 21st century we expected, as a genuinely progressive politics re-merged in the 2010s.
Foolish (perhaps?) to believe in the vitality, the sheer necessity of the work I made to have some kind of agency – some purchase, if only slight, on the moulding of reality.
I am disorientated. The 2020s have brought a deep doubt about the potency of art, my art, and what the work itself becomes once that potency is absent – even if only in my own perceptions.
John B Ledger 