WHAT'S BEHIND THE WORK

 

These works explore a world that exists between art and science. Like abstract landscapes, the paintings inhabit a place where reason and emotion meet. The works use a formal and limited vocabulary—a collection of visual algorithms developed to address theories of process in both physical and abstract worlds. This lexicon is used to examine the development of consciousness, the evolution of knowledge and the resulting effects when systems meet and accommodate one to the other creating something entirely new.

The composition of the paintings not only represents these ideas but asks questions within the vernacular and looks for answers in the results. While the images often appear complicated, this complexity is nothing more than an organised simplicity. It is within the results of these visual conflicts, created by the multiple layers of shape, colour, and idea that a solution is found which may address subjects beyond the edge of the painting itself. The resulting works of art are not the goal found at the end of the journey, but, like any language, the vehicle used to get there.

The process of arriving at a meaningful understanding of the world may be likened to the experience of jumping into an ocean: first we plunge, and appear to be surrounded only by unimaginable chaos. But before long, we feel movement and change. A wave rushes past us, then another; we begin to detect subtle differences in temperature from above and below. Soon, we recognize a rhythm to these movements, and then, suddenly, we discern organization. And in this organization, the ocean becomes, finally, imaginable. So, too, the world.

But just as we cannot imagine the ocean solely through the water molecules that compose it, we cannot understand our world simply by naming its constituent elements. What makes the ocean the ocean—and what makes the world the world—is instead a process by which all these parts come together, are bound each to each, and move through time and space to emerge as something greater than themselves.

The simple notation of "1 + 1 > 2" describes the evolutionary process that produces these emergent phenomena. It is a means of describing the “magic” that happens when the result of any exchange of information is more than just the sum of its parts. The threshold of this transformation is found at that place where the “greater than” emerges from the system, in that moment when the magic becomes apparent.

The richness of reality is read in the multiple layering of these moments of change. And they are everywhere. They vibrate between electrons embracing the atomic nucleus and trace the molecular bindings which evoke colour from a rainbow. They exist between genes within DNA and shape the intricacy of cells which form the human body. These transformative thresholds are found not only in the physical world but also where ideas are exchanged, words come together and theories are made. They define the co-operation and conflict of cultures when belief systems meet and evolve. The depth and texture of our experience is awakened in the complexity that emerges from the infinite number of transformations taking place everywhere around us.

A work of art, like all other things, is a collection of these thresholds of change. It is an emerging phenomenon on a multitude of levels. While physically arrested in time, its abstract life unceasingly engages with its environment, changing and being changed by all that surrounds it. A successful painting will reach off the wall and envelop the viewer in a new and different reality. It will speak its own language with its own vocabulary and explain why the world is more than simple chaos. It will also reflect back an account of the viewer’s own experience, a version which has been altered in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways. Both painting and viewer change with each viewing. Each offers the other fresh perspectives and new contexts.

All systems, physical and abstract, living or not, operate in this same way. The emergence of new phenomena takes place at all times in all places between all things. None are ever finished. All are constantly moving— adapting to their surroundings in a never-ending dance of contextual evolution. The majesty of the entire universe emerges from within this intimate, invisible and delicate rhythm.

In truth, we and the world around us are not things at all but simply the ever changing relationships that exist in the spaces between. When water becomes the ocean, the simple atom becomes our world.