Logos – Hamish

Logos – Hamish is the first work in the Sleep series to emerge without a physical performer. Its subject, Hamish Alcorn, owns a landmark Brisbane bookstore and considers himself a servant of λόγος — Logos, the Greek principle of word, reason, and the ordering intelligence that underlies things.

He is painted here in the country of his dreaming: the stars above him at the moment of his birth, the eastern coast of Australia spread below — the land where he has always lived. The two horizons meet in him.

The three stars crossing his ribs are Orion's Belt. At his hip, the Orion Nebula — considered the birthplace of stars, a place of origin and perpetual becoming. From there, issuing outward in waves across the coast, flows the energetic blast of creative logic. And at Hamish's lips: the star of Orion's arrow — the word itself, still in the act of emerging.