Aigrette

Lumen & Logic

A full-bleed sheet of crimson strands, every one a smooth round-ended noodle with a pale crest down its middle and dark creases at its flanks, combed out of a single line field written in closed form as a sum of angle functions about a handful of singular points — the construction that describes the cores and deltas of a fingerprint or the whorls in hair. Because the field's charges may be half-integer, it can hold a knot where a few hundred strands converge and vanish, a loop core where they turn back through a half-turn in a chain of nested U-turns, and a delta where three flows meet in a dark seam, all on the same sheet and all combed by the same pass. Strands are grown one at a time, each seeded a spacing off the flank of the strand before it and each stopped the moment it comes within a shorter test distance of anything already on the sheet, so the sheet carries exactly as many strands as it has room for and the fact that a pencil holds its pitch while its radius grows ninefold is a consequence rather than a count. Every rounded tip in the picture is one of those stops and every scalloped front is a row of them; nothing anywhere is an outline. A strand is painted wider than the spacing that placed it, so paint order becomes depth: tips shingle across the bundle they stopped against, the creases are the flanks of the strand underneath showing past the strand on top, and the whole relief comes out of one ratio with no shadow, no transparency and no light. Colour is one hue and one ramp, dark in the knots and blush at the tips, and the total charge of the field decides what the rim does — an all-over bloom that runs off every edge, a single great arch, or near-parallel combing with the structure pooled in the middle.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm