“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready.  Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.  You empty yourself and wait, listening.  After a time you hear it:  there is nothing there.  There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread.  You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same.  This is it:  this hum is the silence.  Nature does utter a peep—just this one.”  Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982

One System+Another System=Something Else: An exhibition at the Beland Gallery, Essex Art Center,  Lawrence, MA.   2016      

Detail. Japanese Knotweed. Tetrahedron frame: 3x3x3”. Total dimension is approximately 9x9x9”

 The tetrahedron and icosahedron are the sturdiest, and in my mind, the most visually dynamic of the five Platonic solids.  It doesn’t matter if the joints are flexible, the structure remains rigid in this elegant system.  Trees represent another system of rigidity and flexibility.  As I write this in October, I look forward to the leaves falling, exposing the webs and networks of triangulating branches, each branch a fractal-like pattern of increasingly smaller and smaller copies of itself, stretching to the sky.  

Four icosahedrons and two octahedrons. Constructed from birch, spruce, willow, and unidentified wild flowers. 2016. The triangular face of each Platonic solid are 3x3.”.