An Artist a Day

There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent shout
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”

That solitary prisoner
Will never hear reply.
No comrade in eternity
Can hear the frantic cry.

No heart can share the terror
That haunts his monstrous dark.
The light that filters through the chinks
No other eye can mark.

When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull.

Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.

We’d free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours. 

 - - Ogden Nash

Although humans have the same range of emotional experience, each individual experiences that range and those emotions differently. What for one man becomes a flower for another man becomes a weapon. 
There is that cliché of the teenager who believes that nobody can understand them and nobody has ever loved/hated this much before – when of course, everyone has, and everyone does. What is it inside each person that distinguishes them from their fellows? In which ways are we the same and in which are we forever different?
Synthesis is an exploration into these uncharted territories. It is an investigation through the changing nature of material reality into structure and forms – both physical forms themselves, and the ideological constructs that we create around us in society. 
In Listen… the poet Ogden Nash writes about that quintessential isolation of mankind, that cold truth that, ultimately, we can never truly know another person. 
We are all alone inside our skulls. 
Synthesis, as a fusion of and flow between the works of two very different artists, constitutes that moment when the prisoner inside one skull lays their hand against the bone to almost touch a hand laid on the other side. This is the cataclysm, this need to join with others, to understand and to express. Maybury and McCluskey’s works respond to each other here, at odds with each other but attempting a clear, communicative dialogue.
Synthesis is that point where a solitary bird joins another bird, and they join others, until from one starling there forms a murmuration; and while the birds flock together, there is something startling, and beautiful, and new.