Brueghel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" - a painting that insists on my looking, seeing, witnessing.

Brueghel's painting conveys a moment of "death" where the protagonist Icarus is not central, as others have said 'everything turns away'. The moment of catastrophe is not witnessed; unseen, Icarus plunges into the sea. Everything turns away from the disaster.

In a world of precarity and disaster, how do we face this, and how do we then turn to the future?

Suppose I look at the painting from the perspective of Icarus. In that case, I am suspended between life and death, sky and sea, hope and failure, desire and disaster, man and bird - a liminal space of precarity and possibility. The tension between these opposites holds another space where I, the liminal figure, recognise the consequences of my actions and choices, however misguided. I find myself caught in a space between the soaring of hope and the plunging of despair, of being in the catastrophe - falling, failing, flailing legs. I am unseen, everything turns away. But I am forever held in the fall, I ask what it is to be in the 'fall', the fail and the flail? I embody this suspension; I hold my breath in. I feel the tension between the in-breath and out-breath as I hold onto this moment - suspended in space and time. What does that have for us?

Curiously, Brueghel depicts Icarus not caught in flight, but immersed in water, his legs protruding from the water-line, upper body inverted and invisible. Icarus is spectral because he is a presence unseen, unapprehended by potential observers who co-exist unwittingly, outside his newfound water world.

Icarus’s fall alludes to the inexorable forces of natural selection and of gravity. Humans do not have wings as they have evolved to roam the land and must depend on technology to move in the sea or air. The legs suggest animation, that Icarus is on the threshold of death, but may still be alive. The sea is therefore a portal between life and death.

Technological advance is seen to be a risky business if not a false promise. Technology does not always advance in reliable or intended ways, does not always improve the human condition. The farmer on the cliff top utilises proven technology and seems content ploughing his way through daily existence, entirely predictably, yet carrying on his life's task to farm the land and provide food for himself and his community.

The sea as 'a portal between life and death' resonates with an image that I dreamt, which was of 'Icarus lying upon the rocks; he could be dead, he could be not'.The rock is a liminal place between the land and the sea, submerged underwater and also dry land. The body of Icarus could be alive or dead. For me, Icarus is suspended in a state between, forever flying and falling, which I feel presents an image of some kind of failure and exhaustion of an idea. The technology used to fly, the failing wings created by Icarus' father, the inventor Daedalus, did not serve him well. They had a fatal flaw that they were made with wax, a malleable, soluble and dissolving substance. Are we at a point of exhaustion as AI emerges as the new technology? What are our fears of these new advances in technology and ideas that seem to soar too close to the sun?

The strange atmosphere of Breughel's painting, its eerie 'stillness' and lack of reaction to the catastrophe is unsettling. The pastoral landscape is shaped and ordered with lines and curves; the calm sea contrasts with the strange dark rocks submerged beneath the water as if something else is sinking into the sea, and life goes on, indifferent. This is an eerie 'outside' where forces and agencies are felt as an absence of presence, gravity, fate, and a disappearance (of Icarus and the rocks), presenting the idea that there are unseen forces at work.