2026: a year for depth (not certainty)
If 2025 was a year where perseverance was the dominant code, a year where in spite of the heaving chaos of the world and yowling doubt of internal disapproval, persistence persisted, then on some level, compromise in the face of such arduous output is — was — to be perfectly expected.
Compromise both in artistic practice, and in life. Compromise in favour of a kind of clinging-onto-ness. Compromise in favour of survival. And the thing being compromised was depth. Because the ability to feel safe enough in the world, in my work, and in how I found myself situating myself in my work, to dive vertically with the level of contemplative and artistic freedom I knew I once had access to was, by virtue of 2025, pretty absent. It was after all, a snake year. A hermit year. A year of retrogrades. A year of constant, unpredictable arson, of stamina-in-spite-of-all, of gripping-to-the-sides by any other name.
And how do you recover from such a year? How do you respond? Certainly not with false, wild, swinging-from-chandelier hope. But perhaps with softer, quieter, darker, more viscous and nebulous hope; mixed with a little of that persistence-medicine left over from the days and months passed. For me this has meant something very specific: a re-commitment to a new kind of depth without the tantalising promise of certainty. An attention to depth, and the questions that emerge from within it. A quiet, patient attention, in fact, to attention itself.
That starts with an acknowledgement that here, in the wake of all that is happening, and all that we are constantly exposed to (and exposing ourselves to) on a daily basis, I know very little about very much, and that I can not pretend otherwise. Nor do I want to. So, as an intention — as a sankalpa, I have been chosen the theme of “depth”. But in terms of my approach to such verticality, the attitudes or rather, shifting positions of the work are, I suspect thus:
Attention to curiosity. Asking what is drawing my interest? Moving towards it. Asking questions of it. Beginning at an opening point in the landscape however uncertain.
Bearing active witness. Witnessing and researching and allowing the osmotic impact of the work of others. Of peers. Of artistic forebears. Of philosophical forebears. Of spiritual teachers, writers, thinkers, wild animals, and drunken poets.
Investigation and experimentation. Working with the ideas (that emerge from curiosity and witness work) that have planted a seed. Asking hypotheticals, positing theories, rolling up sleeves, making experiments, deriving learnings, saying, “no, that ain’t it, what else could we try?”, kinetic recalibration.
Seeding forward. Sharing findings, further questions and laboratory notes out loud, as a simple act of creating the beginnings of an ecosystem, a place-marker, a container, a proof of life. To publish, to posit, to utter, unpolished, and without any kind of false certainty whatsoever. Seeding-forward as a vertical process. Not a punctuation mark. As another query; a layer of compost; movable co-ordinates on a map constantly being re-drawn.
Over coming weeks, I will be writing more about the process of reimagining artistic practice as a laboratory environment, and why I find this idea crucial to a spirit and approach of experimentation in film, performance and expanded filmmaking — and yes, pursuit of depth (none of it, of course, ever certain). For now, happy new year.
