HOW TO BOIL AN EGG
2016 / KALASHNIKOVV GALLERY / JOHANNESBURG
ESSAY
THE HEART OF THE UNIVERSE
Wilmien Rossouw
“Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.” Aldous Huxley
What houses us is the presentation of our shells, a single statement of appearance. We sit in our cups, dazed eggs who can’t explain how we became what we are. We get drunk in our cups, good eggs yearning for the Great Reveal of What’s Inside. We want to be devoured by silver spoons. We want to be found and exposed. Inside, all soft, a complex mix of proteins and albumen. We are not our bodies. The fragile chords of the chalaza, natal chords suspending us in a fluid universe, quivers and sighs in soft resignation. What is born can never be unborn. What is open, once opened, can never be re-assembled in the same way. Transformation, then.
Inside the heart of the universe, that all-encompassing egg, we dream love in Technicolor while we wait to emerge, paler versions of ourselves. The egg is always discovered, by seed, by the human hand, by jackal and dog alike. It just lies there, on a bed of straw or grass, patiently waiting to be boiled, or consumed, or painted on. It is the symbol of alchemy, the trinity of life; the intention, the idea and the manifestation. We are changed by our shells as much as we are changed by our substance. We contain multitudes. No aspect stands alone. Scrambled, fried, poached or raw, we cannot escape the essence of human experience – to be found and cracked open by forces outside and inside us. That is how the Universe expands, by adding and subtracting, by building upon what already exists, so that the sum is more than its parts, and the whole consumes the fragments.
For too long, we have walked with our fists tightly closed around what we call ‘Mine’. There is no mine in a post-modern apocalyptic smelting pot of influences. The great works are Great Works. The Newly Invented shouts hoarsely with a timid, self-conscious voice, knowing that Great Works precede it. It is time to collaborate in the grand old kitchen of Found Things, alchemised and egged on by a strange phenomenon called collaboration. You, me and it tallies a different number, a master number, where the thing we call ‘work’ has been done for centuries before, and the time to play is upon us.