Tunnel Studies (or Boundaries and Infinities)
My art begins as a desire to make something beautiful and tangible in response to the constructs of technology and society and the forms and phenomena of nature. For years, I have taken photographs of plants, skies, and water as a means of collecting inspiration and source material for my work. Ongoing developments in technology surrounding digital cameras, scanners, and large format printers have allowed me to work with these images in much the same way that I approach drawing and sculpture.
Iris Series #1. 2005. Cut and layered Iris Prints with pastel. 35 x46”.
Early in 2004 I began tracing the outlines of pistachio shells onto my photographs as a means of framing and isolating small bits of my digital photographs. This led to printing the outlined shapes on top of the photos, and eventually I began cutting into and layering the digital prints themselves.
Iris Series #2. 2005. Cut and layered Iris Prints with pastel. 35x46”.
The cutout areas allow the viewer to move through the layers of imagery, creating a warped sense of space and distance, and shifting our sense of what is inert and what is dynamic. The works relate to our tendency to filter out what is in front of us, in order to see something distant: For example, looking through a crack in a fence to see the sky, or looking through binoculars to focus on something distant. The ellipse as a reference to the lens (eye, microscope, telescope) implies a subtext questioning the correlation between how we perceive and what we think we know. The ellipse is also the product of a culturally construed geometry, at odds with the images from nature.
Iris Series #3. 2005. Cut and layered Iris Prints with pastel. 35x46”.
"I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes, either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed with measurement. The world just pours it out."
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, 2004
Tunnel Studies. 2004. Cut and layered inkjet Prints with pastel. 14x10”
This work explores the issue of patterns of nature and culture existing as the same thing; and the digital (I.E. infinitely repeatable), post-industrial elements of life and their integration with the tactile, singular, handmade object. The introduction of the photographic image inside another image has something to do with that which is infinite being somehow accessible only through the filter of another structure. This is not unlike Galileo viewing the heavens through a telescope of his own making, or scientists basing their sense of reality on what they’ve seen through the lenses of microscopes. Similarly, the layered, photographic assemblage becomes a “protected world within the world.”
I’m standing at a window, inspecting the distant trees through binoculars, searching for something unusual.
Left brain, right brain
Head brain, heart brain
Nerve endings, root balls
Brain stems, plant stems.
Mostly, we rearrange categories.
Can beauty exist when the balance of Yin and Yang have been lost? Is the balance of dualities like matter: never destroyed, but transformed?