We all are always in a state of transition. We live in a changing landscape; with plants which bloom, fade, and die. Animals, including us, are born (face challenges or flourish), mature, and die. Even in the mineral kingdom, the earth’s crust results from the inorganic process of the earth’s change over the centuries.
These two paintings explore transitions in nature and are part of a group of about forty that have grown from a study that I did concerning swarm intelligence. I was interested in the stages and changes that the animal kingdom, particularly insects, go through in their lifetimes. The monarch butterfly is a good case in point. It changes from egg to caterpillar in multiple stages. It finally emerges from its cocoon in Maine and sets off on its migration to Mexico.
I became interested in the maps of networks that ants make in their search for food. They are more efficient, it turns out, in their delivery systems than humans. Ants have graveyards, garbage dumps, food sources, nurseries, etc. that they navigate more effectively than we do in our own traffic patterns. They have army ants and fend off invading insects. It is no wonder that ants captivated the Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, and that he studied and wrote about them for a lifetime. Ants have adapted to survive their challenges by a series of transitions in the way they organize their colony. Ants are the most fascinating to me but flies, termites, slime mold, and maggots also transition in their journeys through their lives.
I wondered what a map for myself might look like. So I started to place on my map ideas from my cabinet of curious images that were exciting or perplexing or mysterious.
I have taken seemingly unrelated images and attempted to connect them. They include fortresses, traffic patterns, formal gardens, geological features, rivers, divided cities (i.e,. Berlin, Baghdad, Jerusalem), systems of various kinds. I like images with a contradictory aspect. For instance, 16th-and 17th-century forts were enormously costly in human and economic terms. However, they were obsolete due to military advancements before they were even completed. Erected to protect, they were often converted into prisons. Similarly, formal gardens were also expensive to execute and built on the back of a public who were forbidden entry. Other themes include aerial views of modern architecture, ancient ruins, and trading routes. I am interested in time wraps, macro and micro views of things, creation and destruction.
As if in a bad dream, we find more and more of our landscape filled with monuments to ideas poorly realized. The footprints of these structures have become or will become palimpsests of our building enterprise. As our memory of our original intent is erased, we invent a new story for the remains. My maps are a kind of psychogeography of a landscape that has become regulated and built upon until it is a network of complexity that unlike the ant network, defies our ability to comprehend.