Umbel

Lumen & Logic

A bouquet of red weeds seen as one ball of flat silhouettes on bare paper — grass blades, foxtail plumes, toothed leaf sprays, pinnate fronds, umbels of tiny florets, catkins and seed pods — built from a single primitive applied at three scales. That primitive is a blade: a curve given a width that varies along it and closed into an outline, where the width is one two-exponent profile whose peak can sit anywhere from the base to the tip. A stem is that profile nearly flat, a grass blade is it weighted to the root, a leaf is it weighted to the middle, a floret is a stub — one function, not a shape library. One recursive rule assembles them: an axis wears blades along it, alternate, opposite, whorled, tufted or gathered into a terminal head, and a blade may itself be an axis, so fronds and umbels come out two levels deep with no new code. One composition rule places them: every axis is rooted in the same small knot at the centre and points away from it, and its tip lands on a shared envelope, so the mass reads as a sphere and the ink thins outward on its own because the number of specimens crossing a circle does not grow with its radius. The apparent botanical variety is a cast of a dozen species sampled once per picture, each one re-grown many times from a different seed — the repeats are what make it read as real plants rather than as texture. Each plant is a single flat ink, so overlapping silhouettes stay legible as objects; depth is occlusion alone. No outline, no gradient, no transparency, no shading, and no mark anywhere that is not a blade.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

90 × 90 cm