"During my final year at RMIT University in Melbourne, my professor made something clear: being an artist requires transcending conservative boundaries. It means the fundamental transformation of oneself. Repeating traditional patterns of thought and behavior, he said, will fail to yield any new questions or insights. That winter I jumped into the freezing waters of Port Melbourne; during the summer, I returned to the beach, buried myself beneath the hot sand, and tried desperately to breathe. No new insights, no new questions. Only physical pain and a creative dead end.
It occurred to me that alongside the practical, the intellectual and the theoretical are integral components to my practice, so I immersed myself in books on art, design, and philosophy. It was one of those volumes, with the mesmerizing and powerful eyes of a woman on the cover, that profoundly connected me to the work of the renowned performance artist Marina Abramović, who has relentlessly pushed her body and mind to their limits until new possibilities emerged."
