Iteration and Emergence

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My early practice engaged in a dialogue with natural phenomena. Of particular interest was how a few hidden patterns in nature produce a diversity of form.

This body of work looked at the way fractals are a way of visualizing chaotic behaviors, the work was an exploration of the nature of complexity. I was drawn to the organic, to plant forms because nature has a very simple and effective method for building complicated structures from simple parts using recursion – manifesting in endless instances of pattern, symmetry and geometry.

When I was working with more tradition forms of printmaking, lithography, etching or serigraphy, the process, i.e. the iterative quality central to the printing process, informed a lot of the work. This led me to explore the idea of iteration and repetition in different disciplines, math’s, physics, biology, music etc. Line played a very significant role, both as a unifying element and as the tool for constructing form, there is a mediation between the mathematical and the organic.

Complexity cannot be truly comprehended without a conviction of its underlying simplicity. Order and chaos are often thought to be polar opposites, yet a new form of chaos may be explored that is not just something in the middle, a splitting of the difference, it may be a third pole.