Wheels Within Wheels
In my abstract work I utilize repeated units, often circles, and I think of those units as individuals, or individual days, iterations of repeated tasks, etc. Each one with a personality, a slight variation, but largely conforming to the overall schema. Ordered chaos, the rhythms and forms of everything around us, endless repetition with endless variation. Nothing is entirely new, yet nothing has happened exactly the same way before. We exist among such collections: plants, weather patterns, people themselves are one such collection, every day adds to our personal collection of instances, everything we do throughout those days conforms and digresses to a pattern, keeping us in vaguely identical orbits, though never actually permitting us to stay completely on track.
The flicker of a flame generates an infinite series of tori through time, the wick serving as a strange attractor, a fixed point around which a fluid is pulled, but never through.
Some work hard to force their lives back into strict order, lamenting each variation as a failure. Other chafe against routine, addicted to variation, to “new” experiences, feeling increasingly hollow as patterns emerge, as refrains from their past pop up again to remind them. You will never get back that thing you loved exactly as it was, and you will never truly experience something new. In your youth, events sear you with their white hot newness, and yet pain and joy alike never feel entirely new, somehow resonating, vibrating with that unsettling certainty that it is tied to experiences you are yet to have. Age and experience conspire to force you to classify each moment as akin to these first moments and then to each other, mounting evidence of distinct cases filed in existing folders.
The beauty in all this is that if you look closely, you can always find what you perceive to lack. The repetition is always, always there, yet so is the variation. And you can see more of either the harder you look.
In the Oscillation series, I take the natural ordered chaos of a hand drawn circle and square it so to speak, adding another circle inside so that now the units, each olive-esque entity, can draw close or dissipate. The rotation within the rotation suggests movement while remaining in place, a wheel within a wheel, oscillation. The grinding of gears, the tension is there, but they’re smooshed up against each other, packed in, struggling yet remaining stationary. The teeming undulation of life, on a molecular level, on an orbital level. The underlying geometry of time-lapse footage of a forest, each tree slowly rotating in place to reach for the sun.
Everything cycles. When we perceive a straight line, it’s only because the radius is so large, and we are fixed on one point along it. Recognizing the cycle for what it is allows you to rest assured you will get to the other side of things again, eventually. But the context will have transformed, everything around it will line up differently.
Infinite repetition with infinite variation. As immutable as a leaf which forms itself again and again in the same way, and as temporary as a snowflake, each moment grows from the last, each task contingent on the ones before it, each person just like the people they descended from, so strikingly similar to the people around them, but changed somehow even from the person they were yesterday, the person they were moments ago.