Introduction
This site attempts a thematic taxonomy of my practice. It is being continuously revised and shows aspects of work from 1990 to the present.
Work is grouped into themes and one body of work or project may find itself on two, three of more pages. Some themes are quite specific, others represent longer term preoccupations. Please forgive the gross topological distortion inherent in the fact that each theme big or small occupies a similar twig of the tree as do the more factual pages of this site.
This tree is an icon of 19th century science. Drawn by naturalist and illustrator Ernst Haeckel in 1868, it served as a powerful affirmation of Darwin's then radical new explanation of human origins and place within nature - The Origin of Species. I have appropriated it as a cipher of the attempt to categorize and classify a disparate body of work . Haeckel's original tree is surely as distorted as my appropriation; it placed a single species, Homo Sapiens triumphantly at the crown and the many millions of species of insect on a lowly twig near the bottom.
I hope you find the various possible pathways through this site engaging and any comment or enquiries are welcome through the contact page.
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"When we try to
pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything in the universe."
John Muir
I work between sculpture, installation, digital art-forms and public projects. The central ideas in my work pertain to how humans interface with nature. Concepts and metaphors from various branches of science are deployed. Topology- the study of the properties of form that remain invariant under distortion, entropy- the tendency for energy and organization to dissipate and homeostasis or autopoesis- the ability of a system, organism or machine to maintain a steady state internally in an entropic environment would be three of the more important ones.
Patterns and fragments are sifted from the natural and the cultural ecosystems and recombined. These patterns could be the connective tissue of the city, for example a motor way or a street pattern. Equally they could be the connective tissue of natural systems ‚ the branching of a tree, the migratory route of birds or the vascular system of an organism. I see the city as much an organism as an animal or plant or ecosystem.*
The act of isolation of an element; removing it from its context allows the combining of fragments from different systems and is part of an ongoing practice of 'relational taxonomy'. This juxtaposing of disparate yet homologous structures could be seen as a form of Spinozan monism. It attempts to articulate an intuition of an underlying commonality and empathy between aspects of the phenomenal world.
The conceptual background for this work is informed by the process philosophy of A N Whitehead, the 'classical' cybernetics of Norbert Weiner and Gregory Bateson and the biology of Rupert Sheldrake, Lynn Magulis and James Lovelock. I am also interested in the more teleological perspective of process theology. The practice and research methods depicted here are transdisciplinary; synthetic rather than analytic.
The third ecosystem this work explores is the mental; the ecosystem that
is the set of relationships internal to human attempts to describe, control
and ideate nature through the sciences and art. Much of this work looks
at these relationships between the forms, systems and structures of nature,
as described and represented by science.
This interest in ecological ways of thinking goes back to childhood; I have always felt sensitive to the interactions of city and nature. My work refers to the map as much as the territory. On trips into town I would examine the street directory as much as look out the window of my parents car. The way land use is represented in maps is to me as interesting a subject as the land use itself.
My work looks at connections and interfaces between multiple natural and cultural overlays on the landscape. It is informed by a an ecological world view and attempts to elucidate the interaction of commensurable 'spheres' of the natural, the cultural and the mental (psychological) that can be overlaid upon each other like the transparent plastic sections of the human body in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
The branching of a tree, the root directory of a website or the infinitely intricate tracery of the lungs or vascular system of the human body form a set of important metaphors; I see them as structurally and conceptually analogous. These images can be read on the more abstract level of bifurcating systems that distribute matter and consciousness through the intricately interlinked networks and channels of the “Mechanosphere” (Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a human-built infrastructure replacing the natural, spreading over the globe), the “Noosphere” (theologian Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the sphere of shared consciousness or sentience), and the Biosphere (biologist James Lovelock,s term for the living skin of the planet). I see these spheres as parts of an interconnected system of feedback loops mutating, evolving and recombining in an endless exchange of energy and information.
I also look at the way the natural is referenced in everyday objects and
the vernacular aesthetics of cheap domestic furnishings. Caravan Romance from 1996 is a cut up modernist chipboard and woodgrain laminex coffee table.
More recently I have been examining relationships between the natural world and architectural/calligraphic ornament. Some of my cues are taken from 19th century practitioner/theorists such as Viollet le Duc and Owen Jones whose polemics theorised direct links between the aesthetics of nature and of ornament from diverse cultures and historical periods.
Relationships between vegetative ornament and biological systems and structures is explored in my current work. The L-System was invented by biologist Aristid Lindemayer in 1968. He adapted one of Noam Chomsky’s formal languages into a rule-based grammar for the mathematical generation of artificial plants . This algorythmic system along with many others have formed a major new discipline of computational biology that mimics nature "in silico" in an attempt to understand and replicate its generative processes
This current work contends that the aesthetic results of these computational processes share many structural similarities with vegetative ornament; they could be said to be topologically commensurate. WallZip and Ornamatrix adopt a simultaneously ornament and rule-based linguistic grammar with which to organise themselves.
The metaphor of the bitmap (digital) and the vector line, ( analogue) is an important device in slightly earlier work. In Dendrite the bottom half of a tree pattern is digitised or pixellated and the
upper half is rendered more naturalistically. It is a representation of
a natural form via technology. Like much preceding work, it begs the question:
is nature best represented as a series of quanta-like events and objects
(bitmap) or as a more dynamic, fluid process (vector).
The relationship between art and architecture and art and landscape is
another important aspect. Much of my commissioned work, for example, Pollinator
Phenotype and Arborescence directly explore this relationship.
Some of these works, for example, Proximities beg questions such as: how organic (natural) form is appropriated by art, science and design; how their visual codes and models of how the world works become fixed in public consciousness.
This concern with the connection between the natural and the artificial manifested in a series of ecological installations in the 1990's. Representations of nature and nature itself were combined in large scale works that suggest that nature creates art as much as art creates nature.
*My use of the 'ecosystem' in multiple contexts is indebted to Felix Guattari's essay, "The Three Ecologies" in which he expands the notion of ecology to include the mental and the social as well as the environmental.
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a visualisation of biologist C.F Waddington's notion of chreodes or pathways of probablility. He applied this as a metaphor for the unfolding of structure and complexity in the embryo , the branches of the animal and plant kingdoms and the whole sphere of organic life.
Aristotle
"Readers of poetry see the factory village and the railway,
and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for
these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the
poet sees them fall within the great order not less than the beehive
or the spiders geometric web. Nature adopts them very fast into her
vital circles and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own."
from “The Poet”,
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gottfried Liebnitz, Monadologie
pattern
pater
father
mother
mater
matter
"Without
modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no
change in mentalities. Here, we are in the presence of a circle that leads
me to postulate the necessity of founding an "ecosophy" that
would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology."
Felix Guattari
As process philosophers see it, processes are basic and things derivative, because it takes a mental process (of separation) to extract "things" from the blooming buzzing confusion of the world's physical processes.
Nicholas Rescher
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
