Artist Statement
The forms with which I have chosen to work come directly from string theory, a theory in physics that is attempting to explain the function of our universe in a poetic, non-rational but still scientific capacity. I have found a sublime beauty in how these shapes (called Calabi-Yau manifolds) function physically as building blocks of becoming; not becoming as a verb, but as a noun, literally vibrating the universe into existence. I see these manifolds as shapes that not only form the universe and our experience, but are also the embodiment of a ‘blank metaphor’, both defined and completely undefinable. Since they exist on a multiplicity of dimensions, the forms that we can output visually are only the three-dimensional imprint or ‘shadow’ of the full form. Through my attempts at revealing them more fully in a poetic fashion, for me they have come to serve as vessels: containers that can describe the external without hiding from us the internal. To me they are the hidden graphemes in the written language of universal human existence.
I have attempted to collapse form and process, and parallel the physics by which the work was inspired, always openly inviting formal and technical contradiction into the work in a conversational, narrative and epistemological capacity: the work is at once graphic and delicate, diagrammatical but expressive, spacial but decidedly flat, mutable but fixed, formed and formless. This in turn creates an invaluable area of consilience wherein the questions and relationships are given focus: literally, as far as the fields of art and science are concerned; and metaphorically, within our spiritual and experiential selves. My research, much like string theory, is merely an ongoing series of coordinates that surround (but do not contain) an investigation that hopes to learn as much from being observed as do the observers from the spaces themselves, pointing to possibility as opposed to prediction. My work is my attempt at illustrating an eternal, wondrous and ultimately human sound (one with at once a finite and infinite decay): a poetic and scientific universe where we can simply allow ourselves to become.