Maelstrom

Lumen & Logic

A heap of shredded matter turning around one eye, on flat black. Two families of mark are piled into a single lobed envelope and interleaved in one paint order, so neither sits on top of the other: flat opaque cut shapes with no outline and no texture — pointed petals, boomerang crescents, acute triangles, tapering slivers, plain discs and cupped hooks, a share of them painted in inks that sit down at the ground so they punch holes in the mass and crop their neighbours into slivers — and constant-width filaments with round ends that run at low curvature and keep dropping into complete ringlets, the loop of longhand rather than the meander of a flow field. The shapes stop at the edge of the heap; the filaments carry on past it, so the silhouette is drawn by escaping line while the mass is drawn by cut paper. Over all of it is printed one screen of small dark dots, which is the piece: the screen is stencilled against the accumulated shapes, so it prints on the heap and never once on the bare ground, small shapes catch nothing, and neighbouring shapes hold their dots in register because they are sampling the same lattice. That lattice is warped by a single vortex — far out it is loose staggered rows, and as it nears the eye the rows bend, the pitch tightens and the dots shrink with it until they are clean spiral arms winding into a small concentric bullseye. The same vortex leans the filament walk, so the heap turns around the point its dots drain into. Flat and opaque throughout: no outline, no gradient, no blur, no shadow, no taper and no perspective, with depth from occlusion and a little plain alpha on a minority of elements to supply the muted tones between the primaries.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm