Sprung from a single source, three very different branches of work are obvious in my output. First, I make procedural abstractions; second, paintings that quote medieval imagery; and finally, pastel drawings that teem with bodies - be they animal, vegetable or human. Diverse though this may appear, a fascination with cycles of transformation unites them all.
In the abstract work, each painting or drawing is the aftermath of simple, procedural rulemaking, comprehensively predetermined in the hope that surprise, instead of being hampered by limitation, might actually depend on it.
Next, a series of what will be eleven acrylic paintings quote directly from a set of late medieval images found in ‘ars moriendi’ - a visual manual meant to instruct the then largely illiterate population on how to achieve a good death. Here, mortal limitation is dealt with in narrative, religious and historic terms to strange ends.
Finally, with pastel on paper I revel in the exuberant transformations of nature, intertwined, crucially, with its sacrificial tendencies: how instinct can ensure the survival of the species at the cost of the individual, or how extinction can signal a kind of modulated survival through genetic similarity. In my view, the interlocked nature of life and death, continuity and change is suffused with the glow of sacred contradiction.
Abstraction
Using strict rules, I construct images on the belief that they have an eerie capacity to generate surprise...even freedom. These limits need not be elaborate, or even obviously visible. Even so, they form bizarre chandeliers of crystal, guide the catacomb construction of ant colonies, the spread of cities, and the swoop of flocks, often with eerie similarity. Yet, awareness of these limits grants no predictive power, or the ennui of omniscience.
This is good, and fascinating.
Every piece I make is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits based on a root number with a clear beginning and end. Using self-similar shapes in a mode of familiar, naturalistic construction, these pieces of visual script are allowed to accrue and to display their peculiar surprises
Add to these systems environmental pressures (in this case, cataclysmic spills of paint) and the flexibility and regenerative capacity of a given set of rules is tested even further. The system must respond and rebuild using fragments of surviving information.
Perhaps intelligence can be understood as the ability to create or recognize pattern; perhaps patterns themselves are a form of intelligence – capable of surprise, without breaking a single rule. Which, in the end, is a satisfying contradiction, an energetic tension of philosophical forces hospitable to constrained freedom and consistent astonishment.
Ars Moriendi
First appearing in 1415, Ars moriendi was a Latin text about how to achieve a good death. Endemic illiteracy motivated a swift ‘translation’ into eleven illustrations which communicated by using the shared religious symbolism of a common social imaginary. Concurrently, the printing press was coming into widespread use, and due to the urgency of its topic, nearly 50,000 copies of Ars moriendi were published. As a result of all this, one could make the surprising argument that images explicating how to die well are foundational to the modern west.
In 2019, I began using ars moriendi images directly, quoting the originals in the same method of construction used for my abstract work. To me, the logic is consistent, since both contend with the power of limits – one, the limits of rules, the other, the limits of meaning and mortality.
By pulling apart the original images in imitation of movable type, to my mind, I mimic the gradual dismantling of shared social meaning. It also conveys the fragmentary quality common to the contemporary life. Secular existence is porous. Modernity cannot dismiss the influence of a multitude of histories, enchantments and spiritual hauntings.
Soft Pastel Drawings
So too in the case of the natural word; the delineations between bodies, the past and the present, the individual and the species are often difficult to locate. The voice of multitudes curls tightly in the double helix of every creature and the mysterious force of instinct shapes inexplicable behavior.
Most strange to contemporary sensibility are the self-sacrificial impulses of many creatures, who value to perpetuation of species over survival of the individual, or the interlocking dependencies of species: a curved beak perfect to harvest the nectar of only one flower.
Calibrated so exquisitely, each living thing occupies its niche, much like the compositional structure of these drawings, where each element is enveloped by its neighbor, making room for one another, even for death. Yet the mortality inherent in the natural world does not erase, but instead transforms. The Madagascar Suicide Palm tree may expire in its energetic effort to produce an efflorescence of over a million blooms, but it lives on, multiplied, in the uncertain fate of as many seeds.