Eternity: The use of multiple images to form a new thought.

Tidal

Grey

The other day I made a mistake when ordering a collection of 4x6 prints and got twice as many as I needed. This lead me to a new way of using images, not one, but an assemblage that contained the original image which was repeated ten times within a pattern.

I have always been interested in the kind of patterning that one would usually associate with textile design and printing: where a single pattern is repeated side by side to form a new, more complex design. It was natural that I would start shuffling the photos into this kind of multiple repeating pattern and that I would find a new way of thinking about the making of photographic images. Oh, I know one can form patterns in a 'photoshop' program, but this physical assemblage felt quite different, as though using my hands and eyes was qualitatively separate from computer work.

I find it interesting how thought can come from working with materials, as though what my hands discover, working with one part of my mind, can inform another more theoretical side. Can fingers really be that smart? What I see forming through the repeating assemblage is a kind of deeper pattern that uses the single take of reality, - a photograph -, and then speaks of that deep river where all our surface impressions meet as one in the flow of life. That river that we all wade in when we set out to create. The muse, the ground of being, the unconscious, whatever we refer to when we try to give some words to express the ineffable. These images are a reference to that thing.