Some things are certain. Some other things are not remotely certain.
Somewhere in-between those two states is the void of possibility and I revel in its unproven-ness.
I could tell you all the significant points along the way in the research that I have done for this exhibition – about how the concept of a worldline** placed me in a distracted glaze for some weeks; how a Hermann Minkowski diagram expanded the possibilities of the universe. That I was introduced to the work of James Maxwell and through the focus of his brilliance, lit a tiny flickering candle. How it was a meeting of time and space and colour and light and electromagnetics where everything connected in a quiet voice which whispered of course.
I’m not sure that it imbues the artwork with any kind of gravity for you to know it; like those events in a worldline – these are simply occurrences that happened, significant or no.
These artworks then, are a series of worlds. Or spaces. Or rules, or mechanisms whose tenuous connections always come back to the spatial language of Geometry. They are objects floating in aether whose responsibility it is to direct and filtrate light. To amplify a signal from afar, to transmute from one kind of frequency to the next.
They are the visible beams of colour which occur when light is split in certain ways, and they are the stuff of the universe – spilling messily outside the tidy axioms. They seek to defy the second dimension and smash right through to the fourth and they do it with a materiality of paint and wood. Not your typical tools of the trade, granted, but when the journey is a little obscured, you can only kick back and enjoy the smokescreen.
When I say dirty, I guess I mean adulterated. Like, the beauty and perfection of the world of geometry through my sadly inadequate linguistics. Or even in the way a lot of these artworks were physically made, which honestly, was a labour of careful planning and a hearty injection of chaos:
Draft the world, introduce the chaos, meticulously paint around the chaos thereby embedding it into the internal architecture of each artwork. Make it inherent. Make it intrinsic. Direct the mess until it forms its own messy logic and language. We direct everything. That’s the job really.
I direct your gaze right now from particle to dustmote and ask you to treasure each seemingly accidental splatter knowing that after the fact, and with some distance of perspective we’ll be able to see that everything (including the mess) was part of the plan all along.
**a worldline is the path which an object (or a subject) traces through spacetime.