"...The tent itself is like the shadow of an object whose form can be imagined but never seen. The exposed seams create a further dislocation, as if the room were wearing its garment 'inside-out'. On entering the space, removed from the everyday sounds and movement of the `outside', and distanced from the rituals of the passing day, one experiences the sensation of a cocooned and muffled stillness, of the interiority of time. We approach the 'ecstatic', an experience of the other side.

There is almost a literal analogy here in with the experience of 'blacking out' - a momentary loss of consciousness, a dispossession of reality, which Catherine Clement advances as an experience of syncope. And the relevance to this reflection on Judith Cowan's work is that it is in syncope that the author identifies the creative experience. Drawn from the vocabulary of music (the art form above all that combines synchrony with diachrony, the continuity of repetition and return with the discontinuity of emotional affect) syncope is 'prolongation on the strong beat of a sound begun on the weak beat; wherefore, every syncopated note is in counter time, and every collection of syncopated notes is a movement in counter time. "Syncope is, then, an enfolding of the first beat by the following, producing a momentary suspension of breath, a suspension of time, a 'blacking out', or a dissolution of the limits that separate the subject from what Rilke calls the 'world's inner space'. It is the necessary loss of selfhood - indeed, a death of the self - that the artist must undergo to enable the work to emerge..."

Jean Fisher

catalogue essay in present ..... passing