Man has always approached the beginning and end of eras archetypally as a time of peril and doom. Today, we also usher the end of an epoch with a sense of profound insecurity and uncertainty as the advent of this new world will necessitate new ways of living (in distance) and existing together on this earth. Never before in modern history has humanity experienced such levels of alienation and isolation. Never before have we become so distant to one another. 

Humanity is collectively bound by a crippling fear that bleakness and instability is the only likely certainty that the future holds. With the world brought to its knees, the invisible and sinister pandemic has also brought with it the collapse of the cultural canon and the complete erosion of human modes of existence. We watch in trepidation as doctors and nurses die in vain. We witness the obliteration of an entire generation as many of our elderly suffer and die alone. With much of the world in lockdown, we watch on helplessly as world dissolution ripens before our very eyes.

With the breakdown of the world of security comes the disintegration of all that is known and certain to man, plunging him  into a state of darkness, or as the alchemists called it, the blackness, or the ‘nigredo’.  

‘Nigredo’ - the first of the three stages in the alchemical process, which begins in death and decay. It is the blackness and chaos of the ‘Prima Materia’ which brings about the disintegration of distinction and forms. For the individual, this involves the draining of the psychic libido into the darkness. But as we fall back into the chaotic state of prima materia, we also surrender ourselves to a process in which our psyche returns to its state of origination.

The three stages in the alchemical process can also be interpreted as a means of marking one's psychological development in the individuation process. The first stage in the process of individuation first begins when consciousness discovers its own world (the Real Self), this is followed by the second stage through discovery of the world of others (the Individuate Self), and finally the third stage, the ‘rubedo’, the consciousness discovers the divine world (the divine self). 

Completed over the course of the first few weeks of Spring 2020 just as the United Kingdom was put into lockdown in an unprecedented step to attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus. These paintings form part of a series entitled 'Spring is Here (But We Are Not)'. They are mental and visual projections of each of the three stages in the alchemical process, nigredo (the blackening), albedo (the whitening), and rubedo (the reddening).

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Daphne Ang