Cloud Maps

There’s a set repertoire of conditions and patterns, but the results are infinitely variable. Every day brings new vistas of changing colours, between a towering sky an ever-shifting water surface.

Chasing a single wave, the eye is lost amongst the complex patterns and shifting geometry of the surface. Even with the greatest concentration, every effort is thwarted. Again, a photo can arrest one moment in time and reveal certain geometries. But a single instant is not what water waves are. A moment is not the experience.

It's only in these acts of active looking, of trying really hard to see, that one can appreciate how inadequate human perception really is.  Most of the time its hard to escape the illusion that we see all there is like a high-resolution camera.

More than an illusion, the neuroscientist Anil Seth argues that our perception amounts to a hallucination. The mind projects a best guess of how things may be, and our senses provide feedback as to the accuracy of these assumptions.

I’m interested in the that moment when the hallucination coalesces and when it breaks apart. I’m trying to make work that straddles the threshold between the illusion and the material through which the illusion manifests. Lines turn into water. Clouds turn into grids. Waves turn into fabric. And then it all turns back again. Back and forth, depending on the distance angle of view, lighting, and reflections.