Fences of The Mind: Reflections, Boundaries, and the Unconscious
Fences of the Mind
I have always trusted water to tell me the truth about a place—and, more secretly, about myself. Its surface is a live canvas: a membrane that accepts the world above, distorts it, then offers the result back as something strangely new. In Fences of the Mind I leaned hard into that alchemy, aiming my lens at an ordinary shoreline fence and allowing the small waves to become co-authors. What emerged feels uncannily like an Edward Hopper streetscape—solid posts, sun-washed façades—yet the image also flirts with the loose gesture of the abstract expressionists who mined reality for emotion rather than accuracy.
The title is deliberately provocative. A fence, after all, both defines and confines; it marks ownership, keeps outsiders at bay, and reassures those within. But when that same barrier appears in water, its rigidity melts. Pickets bend, stripes sway, colours bleed into one another. I wanted viewers to feel the moment that mental certainty softens: the split-second when you realise that “solid” ideas—about identity, memory, even geography—can be as fluid as the ripples that rewrote these planks.
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel reminds us that perception is never passive; the brain is constantly making unconscious inferences, filling gaps, projecting meanings. Stand before this print and you may see a harbour boardwalk, or the façade of a forgotten suburb, or perhaps just an abstract rhythm of ochres and greens. None of those readings is wrong, because each arises from the beholder’s own storehouse of sights and sensations. The water simply provides the prompt; your mind completes the painting.
There is, too, a quiet play on time. Hopper’s realism often held a still, contemplative hush—as though the world had paused long enough for us to feel its solitude. By contrast, the abstraction here refuses to stay still; even frozen in pigment, the lines quiver with remembered movement. In that tension between stasis and motion I find a metaphor for thought itself: ideas appear fixed until some subtle current—a new experience, a half-forgotten dream—sends them wriggling into new shapes.
If this wavering fence has opened a gateway in your own imagination, I invite you to bring the print home—secure your limited-edition piece today and let your walls reflect the boundless conversation of water and mind.
To bring the print home click here.
