Christopher Martin’s
Lost My Mind, Found a New One (2025) is a wry and luminous exploration of renewal, surrender, and the transformative nature of awareness. The work presents a curled white scroll impaled by a black arrow, emblazoned with the phrase:
“
LOST MY MIND
FOUND A NEW ONE.”
With characteristic precision and humor, Martin distills a universal spiritual experience into a minimalist object. The phrase, rendered in bold hand-drawn typography, operates as both confession and enlightenment — an admission of chaos that resolves into clarity. The black arrow, a recurring motif throughout Martin’s sculptural text works, functions here as a visual catalyst — a symbolic point of rupture that allows for awakening.
Visually, the composition’s clean contrast and restrained design amplify its contemplative quality. The scroll’s soft curve and the arrow’s decisive intrusion create a dynamic interplay between fragility and force — chaos giving way to order, or perhaps the other way around. The result is both literal and metaphorical: an image of the mind pierced by insight.
Conceptually, Lost My Mind, Found a New One continues Martin’s exploration of consciousness and impermanence. The statement evokes the idea that losing one’s “mind” — in the sense of ego, expectation, or control — is not a collapse but a liberation. What is found afterward is not a replacement, but a clearer state of being: openness, presence, and renewal.
Through elegant simplicity and philosophical resonance, Martin transforms a colloquial phrase into a koan — a moment of paradox and revelation. Lost My Mind, Found a New One stands as both mantra and mirror, capturing the essence of transformation: that in letting go, we rediscover the self that was never lost.
