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 many cases via cataclysmic spills of paint) and the flexibility and regenerative capacity of a given set of rules is tested even further. The growth protocol 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.