BASAL ELEMENTS
Ink dropped onto water disperses according to physics, not intention. The forms that result, cellular, suspended, alive-feeling, are the outcome of a negotiation between the material and the maker: steered toward a condition, never fully controlled, arriving somewhere neither could have predicted alone.
Basal Elements is the earliest and most elemental of the three series. Where Organic Wreaths approached transience through biomorphic form and Tenderbeing approached human experience through botanical structure, Basal Elements asks a prior question: what is the nature of living things at their most fundamental? The forms here are the structural logic of organisms abstracted: the way things drift, cluster, attract and repel, occupy space in relation to each other rather than in isolation.
Over time the work has moved through reduction, through the acquisition of stems and directionality, toward the most recent works on handmade cotton rag paper where the elements are in explicit dialogue, touching and responding. The surface itself has become a participant: the raw cotton rag absorbs the ink unpredictably, extending the collaboration between material and chance that has always governed the making.
The cutout appears here too: the same deliberate absence that runs through all three series, the shape of something removed that remains structurally present. In Basal Elements it reinforces a question the forms themselves are asking: what is the difference between something inert and something alive? Between a form that simply occupies space and one that is, in some way we cannot fully articulate, aware of what surrounds it?
The works are made in black ink. Colour would resolve what should remain open.
