The Know

“A world that cannot create cannot feel.

A world that cannot feel cannot face itself.

A world that cannot face itself cannot imagine, or tolerate, anything beyond what already is.

And a world that cannot imagine will destroy what it cannot tolerate.

After a while, for the small thinker, anything unfamiliar starts to feel like too much.

There is a way to remain informed but also remain open to change.
And that comes from creativity, imagination and belief.

A generation of brilliant, well-read, deeply thoughtful people have spent the last decade being trained out of the only faculty that could have built an alternative future: our own imagination.

We have been trained, instead, into a permanent state of being informed. Outraged. Engaged. Sickened. Despairing. Disgusted. Aware. All of which, it turns out, slowly turns us into the very things we stand against.

And all of which, it turns out, kill hope for a better future.

But there is hope in every person who has decided, this year, to start building something in their actual life.

There is hope in every artist who has refused to become reactive.
There is hope in every writer who has chosen the slow honest work over the fast outrage.
There is hope in every founder making something the algorithm cannot recommend, every teacher refusing to flatten their curriculum, every parent raising children who can sit with complexity, every community organiser doing the work that does not photograph well.

There is hope in the fact that imagination is renewable. We can, even now, even after years of attempts to train us out of it, get it back. We can get hope back. It atrophies in months. It returns in weeks. The infrastructure is still there. It is just, in most of us, currently buried under several years of compulsive intake and mindless consumption.”
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world

Raf Simpson’s new body of work “Between Frequencies” is the space between structure and movement, where compositions feel close to resolution but never fully settle. Working primarily with acrylic and layered pigments, he builds each painting through a process of revision, allowing traces of change to remain visible, so the structure builds gradually through the process.