hilroy

For I have looked at everything in my life with equanimity. The disconcerting thing is that everything is unfamiliar if I look at it long enough. My bed, clothes, rooms, kin. No emotions stir at a glance, yet if anything is threatened, then my heart is broken over the smallest of things, details. We all tend to romanticise loss with the ultimate perdition being our lives. When we’re on our deathbeds will we look back and be sorry and full of regret? Maybe. Happiness is a warm gun and you cannot hold it for too long.

The Constellation Project

The Constellation Project deals with the fascination of stars, the ephemeral, the complexity of human function and the meaning of life. My inspiration come from seeing how tied up everything, that is seemingly unrelated, is. Humans are universally driven by what they don’t know, rather than by what they do know; it is the law of progress, invention and scope. Yet the precursor, the most notable of pivotal factors in everything that helps us to progress, invent and find scope is beauty. It is the ultimate. Beauty is any shape, colour, mass and density, found in the skies, the seas, strewn across forest floors, smeared over rocks, resemble a furtive glimpse, a touch on naked skin of a smooth pebble, a twining of bodies, cool water to a parched man, a gluttonous feast to a starved one. It can be a smile on a loved one’s face, a flag on enemies’ fallen soldiers, the sight of sun after a storm, the beating rhythm of music, the swipe of an artist’s hand over canvas. Beauty is universal. Beauty is for everyone.

It is this beauty that I search for. My own beauty. I am excited by the sight of the human body, yet get lost in the all the variable possibilities of lines and shapes. How do these opposite ends entice me so? What is the common ground between factor and whole, brick and building, line and mass? There has to be a common denominator to all this.

This project started quite randomly but developed very steadily, constantly building up. Alongside grew the concept, which seemed to drift, absorb ideas and gradually growing stronger and eventually allowing to write this.

In order to explain the Constellation Project I have to back up to a myth I heard from an old dear of mine. The myth goes that humans can understand what our life means by understanding our relation to the stars. As fantastical as it seems, it might just make sense. After all we are made up of the same things that make up everything else in the universe. Our very own building blocks; protons, neutrons, atoms, are the same ones that make up stars, planets and any other matter found in the skies. So that led me to enquire into this matter. A notable and interesting example of a tie that humans have created with the night sky is the Greek mythology - the great and epic scenes on their night skies, which eventually became what we nowadays refer to as ‘Constellations’. The Greek’s night sky was a theatre, the black velvet staged shining apparitions of deities, demi-gods, great hunts and tempestuous love affairs. This led me to observe night skies more keenly.

The random part was that after having worked with mythology on a previous school project, hearing the star-human myth and comparing a much loved children’s join-the-dot’s game, I came up with something. The resulting something was a message, a code encrypted in a most interesting visual manner. The lines connecting the dots, as every star is connected with each and every other star, creates a whole, a building, a mass. This mass is the product of a collection of lines, a collection of anything you wish for them to remember. This building houses your very being, for you to discover. This whole is ultimate meaning of life, of which you might just be that one line. To me this shape is beauty.



I fancy these shapes to be meanings of life, each one encrypting the same information into different visual codes, which ultimately, mean nothing. It might reflect my idea of the ‘answer to the meaning of life’, it might just be a ridiculing of the human race, it might just be a waste of time in the eyes of the crowd. Yet it seems that everyone’s answer is tailored to suit them, in whatever circumstance or fashion they fancy it to be. I might just be commenting on how irrational and egotistical humans can really be.

While this was going on, my fascination for the human body increased drastically. After creating a collection of photographs which document mostly the human body, I was unsure what use this collection would have, other than satisfying the need to have a library of such pictures close at hand. Eventually, after some experimentation, it dawned on me that the Constellation Project could benefit from such a collection. The merging of these two entities of potential could help me create something which made sense and which would make me happy. The human body juxtaposed over by the constellations.

The human body in itself is said to be a temple for the soul. Other described it as the vessel for our soul, during its passing through the mortal, material world. What if we are really contained into something much bigger. This meaning of life, so tailored each and every one of us, so ever changing, is very much a part of us.

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It tibdila giet fil kwiet,
hadet hina u waslet f’waqtha.
Hemm min jghid tmissek kuljum,
u bhax xita, tizzerzaq fuq gildtek.