We Are Only Partly Real, 2025 (Installation shot from VR exhibition – Day Cycle: Zone 3)
A conversation between artworks made by the artist Steve Dutton and Michelle Forrest-Beckett that reflect on the natural world over long periods of time, our place within the world and beyond, within a multiverse.
Portal, 2025
Materials: Compressed charcoal on calico
Dimensions: 140cm W x 70cm H
Photo Credit: Dan Weill
Portal with Borromean Not Knot, 2025
Materials: Matt acrylic on wood
Dimensions: 15cm W x 15cm H x 15cm D
The portal evolved when working on a show with the artist Steve Dutton, titled ‘We are Only Partly Real, 2025’. We had a conversation about wanting a portal in this exhibition and considered it to be a speculative space, setup with the intention of trying to make a connection to something yet unknown. I then ran with the idea, and it evolved through the following three things;
The first thing was an object I found; a wooden Borromean knot, more so, a not knot, as it has interconnecting rings, so it is not an actual knot. Each of the Borromean rings are said to be a symbol of strength in unity, should one ring be removed they all fall apart. The ‘Portal’ as been made so that the ‘Borromean Not Knot’ can be placed on the empty circle (top, middle square).
The second thing was an article Steve put me onto by Jacques Lacan who used the Borromean rings as a metaphor for understanding the mental structure of an individual’s mind and their connection with reality. Lacan associated one link with images and an individual’s imagination, another link is associated with how an individual exchanges information through language, and the third link represents all that cannot be represented by images or language, such as the unknowable, the unthinkable, or that which an individual resists. And if one of Lacan’s links is missing then an individual’s reality is said to be inconsistent.
The third thing that inspired the portal was a tulpa, which I first heard being referred to in the 2017 series ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, co-written and directed by the late David Lynch. A tulpa is said to originate from Tibetan mysticism and is referred in Theosophy as a thought-form, which is a term to describe a being or object that is created through a person’s mental or spiritual powers.
This artwork plays with the symbolism of the rings associated with Lacan’s mental structures of the mind, to consider the prospect of three inconsistent versions of a self, living in parallel realities.