Moodboard: Be Chaotic If You Want!

Let chaos reign …

What a feckin’ mess. News of the world is bad, badder and worse; we scroll, glazed over and numbed, bandwidth deficiency rendering us incapable of reading beyond the bold. Blame it on the Year of the Fire Horse, a once every 60 years Chinese astrological event in which the zodiac’s horse aligns with the element fire. The interpretation varies, depending on the source: The Guardian’s Maya Yang cites experts predicting “intense, fast-paced change on a personal and global level” while Vogue’s Annabel Gat looks at how the Fire Horse will shape our love lives – the vibe is passionate, adventurous and way more fun; we vibe with that. A Miami-based friend, ground zero for the current administration’s ICE immigration crackdown, has seen lives upended all around her, including her own – Fire Horse energy? She describes this moment as riding bareback through flames.

The closure of Dublin’s wonderful Hugh Lane Gallery last September for a projected three-year refurbishment feels deeply personal. Arriving early before meeting visiting American friends for cake and catch-ups in the gallery’s bustling Fáilte Le Grá Café, we’d swing by the French Impressionists and the Scullys, the Yeatses and the Harry Clarkes, the Constables and the Free Staters, barely clocking the thrilling juxtaposition of modern and contemporary Irish and international art housed alongside grand halls featuring works exploring Irish identity catalysed by the turn of the 20th century Celtic Revival Movement. Destination? The creative chaos of a meticulous reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s “shambolic Kensington studio”, aptly described by Stephen Patience in “A Slice of Bacon” for The World of Interiors: “7 Reece Mews looked as if it had been ransacked: crumpled photographs, rags, expensive art monographs and empty crates of Krug were strewn over every available surface; slashed canvases were propped against the paint-smeared walls”. An extravagant man-about-town (“running up thousand-pound weekly bills on champagne alone”), Bacon embraced chaos as process, “claiming he worked best when he was knee-deep in piles of dog-eared visual material: a man picking through the rubble of the culture for inspiration”. Bacon’s mess-terpiece is a master class in organised chaos, granting us a kind of absolution from clutter-free minimalism.

Surfaces, sweetie? Marie Kondo be damned.

Dedicating her Oscar to “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”, Jessie Buckley’s emotional acceptance speech is a reminder that while Chaos Theory posits nothing is random, its exemplar, the Butterfly Effect, poetically illustrates how tiny changes can lead to vastly different, unforeseen results. In another acceptance speech (Buckley won a lot of awards for her work in Hamnet), she articulates being “categorically changed by so many people in this room and beyond. To get to work with my heart in my hand and stand beside my brilliant, daring friends who show me their heart, I mean, what a way to spend a life!” Should we allow ourselves to be changed by forces beyond our control, which feels like chaos, we can surrender to the ground zero of our hearts, a territory Buckley describes admiring in actresses who’ve inspired her life in art: “They’re playing a life that is complex and rich and uncomfortable and challenging and provocative.” In theory, our beautifully chaotic lives balance on butterfly wings. @susanzelouf