Kerf

Lumen & Logic

A laminated block of flat colour seen at one cut: the top face, the bottom face, and, where the blade went through, the edge grain with every ply exposed at its own thickness. The picture is one object rather than three pictures stacked, and three laws carry it. A face is a guillotine subdivision — every edge lies on a line that halves an enclosing rectangle — with a grain that decides which axes it may be cut along: the top of the block is cross-grained and splits both ways, the bottom is straight-grained and splits along one axis only, which is why its panels run edge to edge with no horizontal cut anywhere. One function, one axis mask. A leaf refuses every colour its neighbours are using, so every edge is visible without an outline, except where a weld fires and a leaf takes a neighbour’s colour instead — which is the only way an L-shaped field can appear, and the package has no L-shaped shape. And the band is one ply tape, generated once and read once per course at an offset that performs a lazy random walk down the courses, so a course is a view rather than a thing that was made. Two consequences of that follow with nothing to draw them: two courses at the same offset are identical in every boundary and every colour, so a repeated course is the walk returning rather than anything copying anything, and courses whose offsets differ by one step share their boundaries shifted by exactly that step. The palette is positional and split: a face may only paint the plies that reach the outside of the block while the cut exposes every ply there is, so the band always carries colours neither face shows and never the reverse. A course may chatter into two half-thickness reads one step apart, and one shorter second cut may be scored into a face — the only mark in the package painted over another. The whole model is built in unit coordinates and mapped once at draw time, so a preview and a print are similar rectangle for rectangle. Flat opaque colour throughout: no outline, no gradient, no transparency, no blend mode, no shadow, no texture, no clip, no canvas transform and no curve of any kind.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm