KALEIDESCAPES (2020-?)

KALEIDESCAPES: ‘RAVE ON’

This collection is inspired by closed eye hallucination, kaleidoscopes, feedback loops and chaos theory. Made in the 2nd UK lockdown in the Winter of 2020. These artworks provided me with a very personal kaleidoscopic escape, a technicolour adventure into the unknown. A 30 year body of work in the making. The original ‘fluro acrylic paintings’ and ‘fluro body painted self portraits’ were created in the height of my raving days in 1991. In 2020 whilst trawling through my archive I found these negatives, they were then scanned and digitally reworked: KALEIDESCAPES: ‘RAVE ON’ were re-born...

 **FEEDBACK LOOPS: Order and chaos can emerge on their own, from a simple system with feedback. A feedback loop is a picture in a picture in a picture, small changes become rapidly amplified as they loop around. Even though you can describe each stage in the process mathematically. There’s no way of predicting how tiny changes will end up in the final image.

**CHAOS THEORY: The study of apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws.

**CLOSED EYE HALLUCINATIONS: Under psychedelics, when your eyes are closed the brain may function ‘as if’ there is a visual input when there is none - creating kaleidoscopic patterns.

 

ORDER + CHAOS (2021-22)

When nature, neon dust and black light collide..

Evolving over the past two years during the UK’s extreme weather events; a snow dump in spring and an urban heatwave in the summer months. The combined artificial; neon dust, black light, and natural elements; snow, earth and flora - fuse and mutate to create the ORDER + CHAOS Collection.

These artworks are named after different translations of ‘Mother Earth’’ and of the different types of ‘Snowflakes’.

 

 

[TRACE]

Explores transformation and permanence in the urban micro-landscapes of 21st-century London. Fragments of human artefacts register as litter but speak to wider themes of consumerism and the inscription of human desires onto the environment. Discarded and disused, these found objects are the waste products of food, drugs, drink, furniture, industrial waste, sex and sport. At the end of their intended lives, they nevertheless persist as street-level agents of human activity. Their physical micro transformations of dismemberment, melting and decay are not isolated taphonomic processes but are constitutive of environmental pollution and the reconfiguring of the biosphere. Often hidden from mind, if not sight, [Trace] re-contextualises the detritus of modern urban life as vibrant, fascinating objects embedded in the circuits of global capital and exchange. [Trace] forces us to consider our role as environmental and geological actors in the age of the Anthropocene.

Text by Dr. Tim Stevens