LETTING GO

Letting Go is a participatory artwork that invites a reflection on positive transformation. Gallery visitors are chosen randomly and asked to participate. Once seated, a small artwork is placed before them, and short instructions are given:

Look at the object before you.
Remember a loved one you had to let go.
Think of all the positive ways they shaped you.
Take your time.
Cry if you feel like it (it’s totally fine).
Let Scott know when you’re done.

This little meditative space isn’t opening up for an exercise in self-pity, however - it’s more a reflection on personal growth. The focus is on what remains when loss is experienced; the consequent slow rituals of grief, acceptance, and ultimately, renewal.

The 50 figurines, each individually created by emerging artist Elana Munasinghe, act as vessels – messengers if you like – which, after the short meditation, are given to each of the 50 participants as a gift. The twist? The artwork can’t be kept – it also has to be ‘let go’ as an act of selfless gratitude. Exactly how the artwork is given away is ultimately up to the participant. It might be given to the person in their thoughts, another loved one, or even ‘accidentally’ left on a park bench (my favourite).

In essence, this project does three things: First, it transforms the gallery from a passive viewing space into a site of radical creative exchange. Second, it supports emerging artists by allowing them to have a pivotal role by making art personally relevant at a community level. And third, it questions the true value of art in contrast to the relentless business ontology of art in late stage capitalism (clue: it’s never about what you paid for it).

The Artwank Bit (if you want to dig deeper)
A big part of my ongoing research is to continually question the role of the gallery as a place of activation, transfiguration, and engagement, rather than a merely passive viewing experience. Although this project was inspired by deeply personal events, it’s actually rooted in metaphysics - the branch of philosophy concerned with being, change, and reality itself. At its core is an interesting question; can artwork be transformed – not symbolically, but ontologically – by thought alone?

Maurice Merleau–Ponty, the French phenomenologist, argued that perception is not passive but constitutive. After all, we can't really observe the world from a distance, because we are physically immersed in it. He believed that the body is not so much a vessel for consciousness, rather it is consciousness. So when a person considers an artwork (or listens to bangin’ music) they encounter it with their whole being, making the entire experience transformative.

For Letting Go, the participant’s thoughts, memories, and emotions are not external to the figurine. They enter into it through the act of perception. The object is changed, not overtly physically, but in its being. Truthful attention has reconstituted the object as something new. But is this alone enough?

The Brillo Paradox
For the object to become a work of art, something else is needed: a transfiguration of meaning or essence (as opposed to a transformation which is usually a change in form or state). This was a particular focus for the American philosopher and art critic, Arthur Danto. He famously used the example of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box – the packaging for a type of dish scrubber you’d find in a US supermarket – to illustrate that an artwork is not defined by form alone, but by context, theory, and intention. Warhol’s Brillo Box was placed in a gallery, not a supermarket shelf, so the context necessarily changed the interpretation. It had to be experienced and ‘read’ differently, and so its ‘meaning’ had changed. Thus the same object can be mundane or transcendent, depending on the interpretive framework surrounding it.

Letting Go proposes that the figurine becomes art not just through aesthetic framing (for example, by how cute it looks) but through the emotional intention of the participant. At this point, it is not the artist alone who defines the work, but the viewer who activates it. Danto’s notion of transfiguration is expanded here to include not just philosophical observation, but personal memory. Once the object has been ‘engaged with’ emotionally, might it contain something it didn't have before? Which leads to us even further down the rabbit hole to an even more powerful question…

Can thoughts change matter?
It’s not as daft as it sounds. In fact, Quantum physics has proven it to be factually correct. Like the quantum particle in the double slit experiment, the object in Letting Go exists in a state of indeterminacy. Until it’s observed. Only then, through the act of attention, intention, and participation, does its status collapse into something more ‘fixed’ – that is, an artwork with new meaning. This isn’t a recent phenomenon. Many cultures, particularly those steeped in deep spiritual traditions, already know that certain objects gain power or presence through repeated acts of care, reverence, ritual, or belief.

Letting Go draws from all these hypotheses, suggesting that emotional attention is indeed a transformative force (all of us know the truth of this). So in essence, the participant doesn’t merely project meaning onto the object; they impart something into it. The object now carries part of that person. It has been altered – imperceptibly but irreversibly. And by changing the object in this way, you’re changing the way it exists in the world.

Putting value before cost
The project also nods to the over-commercialisation and commodification of the art industry and its reliance on ‘uniqueness’ and spectacle aesthetics. Here the artwork, by definition, has to be given away for the ritual to be complete. By encouraging the viewer to pass it on – to relinquish possession – the work insists on the non–proprietary nature of this transfiguration. The artwork, just like the person let go, cannot be claimed or ‘owned’. It must be passed on and set free because (like love itself) its meaning cannot be fixed in time. Whatever happens to the artwork in future is beyond our control, which is liberating in itself.

Letting Go asks us to reconsider the boundary between thought and matter, self and object, perception and being, maybe even grief and beauty. It draws from ontology, phenomenology, conceptual art, and metaphysical speculation to offer a quiet but radical proposition: that art can be changed not through what we do to it, but through what it means to us.

In a time when art is so often reduced to mere spectacle, Letting Go gestures towards something older and more sacred; the possibility that the most profound transformations leave no visible mark at all. The ordinary made extraordinary through meaning, not matter.

Scott Lawrie
May 2025