BECOMINGS, 2018
Becomings, a series of dioramas, explores the stories at the root of western culture which have guided and limited our perception. These works revisit The Epic of Gilgamesh, A Sumerian hero tale in which the building of culture is contingent on overcoming animism; Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Cosmology which acknowledges chaos as the raw material of creation yet its mastery as necessary for our continuity; and The Fall from Genesis, which may be interpreted as the expulsion of the vital bifurcating force which threatens unity and equilibrium.
Sources from ancient history are blended with images from cosmology, quantum physics and chaos theory. In this heterochronic juxtaposition of source imagery, I hope to draw attention to how our understanding of time, space and reality has evolved. In probing the fictions we create to shield ourselves from the unknown, I am interested in the confluence of scientific “law” and folklore in shaping our intuition.
Associative coherence, the mind’s desire to eschew ambiguity and create a coherent singular reality, means our perception is biased to admit information which reinforces our own traditions. Linguistics and storytelling physically influence brain formation and thought patterns, creating bias and thus predetermining our relationship with nature, matter, reality and time. In framing the unknown, human’s use the tools of their known world, resulting in the cumulative and persistent nature of bias. At this historical conjunction, a quantum revolution shares contemporaneity with the decolonization movement and the fundament of becoming and mattering in spatiotemporal terms is being re-evaluated. In Becomings, I explore the stories at the roots of my own perceptual bias and how they have determined and limited how I relate to “time”, space and nature. In doing so, I hope to enable new genealogies for my encounters with reality.
TO UNWEAVE A RAINBOW, 2019
….the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations - not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.[1]
“To unweave a Rainbow” contemplates human meaning-making through cosmology, exploring the science and myth from which we construct our sense of reality, our ballast against cosmic loneliness and uncertainty.
Using a confluence of folklore and scientific “law”, I research themes which lie at the border of the unknown; Time, Entropy, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Chaos to ponder questions such as “Why is there something and not nothing?” or “What is the purpose to this eternal drift toward corruption, equilibrium and death?”
Despite being some of the primordial obsessions of man, none of these questions are resolved. The fecundity of generations trying to frame these unknowns, is our precious record of “many generations – not forgetting”. They show us the roots of our intuition and prejudice regarding time, space and matter.
I take the title “To unweave a rainbow” from John Keat’s poem “Lamia” in which he laments that Newton’s physics is robbing the world of mystery.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade[2]
Contrary to Keats, I contend that knowledge feeds mystery and wonder, setting the stage to traverse ever deeper into our experience of nature. The more we discover, the more “spooky” reality becomes. Human meaning-making transcends disciplines and is most nuanced when it remains open to poetic imagination as much as scientific enquiry, when sense is sought as much in the Lamia (half woman, half snake), as in the laws of gravitation.
I compost scientific data with the earliest known written stories of western civilisation. In the series “To Unweave a Rainbow”, you will find The Cosmic Microwave Background, Dark Matter Simulations, Fluid Dynamics, Universe Topographies and Heat Transference Maps adapted to lyrical forms borrowed from Ancient Cosmologies; the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Genesis and the Sumerian “Descent of Innana”.
I regard both Storytelling and data mapping as legitimate forms of encoding information but am also interested in how they encode our perceptual bias. The mind’s desire to eschew ambiguity and create a coherent singular reality, means our perception is biased to admit information which reinforces our own traditions. Storytelling physically influences brain formation and thought patterns, creating bias and thus predetermining our relationship with nature and reality. In framing the unknown, humans use the tools of their known world, resulting in the cumulative and persistent nature of bias.
Over these things, I could not see,
These were the things that bounded me[3]
In composting source material from different disciplines and times together in wooden dioramas which resemble children’s pop up books, I hope to contribute to storytelling practices, cracking open traditions to reveal the roots of bias and create new genealogies which widen intuitions of reality.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, “Four Quartets”, 1943.
John Keats, “Lamia”, 1820.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence”, 1912.