Cosmoses
The word ‘cosmos’ in Greek means ordered, harmonious whole. When Spanish priests set up their mission gardens in Mexico, they gave the cosmos flower its name because of its evenly shaped petals and their symmetrical arrangement around the flower’s centre. Cosmos, as we know, also refers to the universe. Given my interest in Buddhism, this is not just the universe synonymous with the heavens above, but also the universe that is the entire unconscious realm.
Using a variety of opaque as well as translucent origami paper, I created a mass of folded cosmos flowers in different colours and sizes. Each 30” x 40” photogram was made in complete darkness by randomly spreading over a hundred paper flowers onto coloured, light-sensitive paper. After exposure to a short burst of light, the flowers were removed, and the photographic paper processed and fixed. The resulting photograms are therefore all unique.
Cosmoses is divided into five separate colour combinations such as Cosmoses Black (Positive), which consists of photograms with black flowers against a white background. Within each of these combinations, there are ten individual photograms each identified by a roman numeral in its title e.g. Cosmoses White III (Negative). The choice of ten is significant for two reasons. Firstly, as the base unit of the decimal system it enables us to quantify and construct meaning about our universe; apparently random or indeterminable phenomena have often become ordered and calculable through mathematical laws and principles. Secondly, as the number of digits on our hands, the number ten reflects a more primal or bodily conception of relating to the world.
Inherently, the process of origami is systematic. While following a prescribed set of instructions, each flower is handmade and therefore unique. The intricate, repetitive cutting and folding speak of intense labour and craft. At the same time, the almost obsessive attention to detail demanded by origami, induces a stillness; a meditative contemplation that brings the hand, the eye and the mind into close accord. The withdrawal of oneself from external foci therefore presents an opportunity to experience a ‘cosmic wholeness’ within.
The dispersal of origami flowers across the horizontal photographic paper is reminiscent of Leo Steinberg’s description of the ‘flatbed picture plane’[1] in his writing on the paintings of Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. These images do not offer a representation of the world that relates to our vertical posture. Instead, the works oscillate between flatness and infinite depth, suggesting gazing upwards through a telescope at the night sky and a nebula of stars or peering down a microscope into a petri-dish world of organisms. Other parallels with painting can also be made. Across the smooth, highly reflective surfaces, colours and shapes continuously shift between the crisp, hard edges of collage and the fluid blurring of wet pigment. The haphazard kaleidoscopic scatterings engender a childlike joy in the purely optical.
The glossy sheets of Ilfochrome or Ilfoflex paper are encased in large deep-set frames closely resembling specimen boxes. This intentionally connects Cosmoses to some of the early experimental photography of the 19th century. Namely the botanical photograms of Henry Fox Talbot and the cyanotypes of plants collected and categorised by Anna Atkins. Talbot himself was intrigued by the recurring cycles of nature, interwoven with the flux between randomness and order as well as the alchemical potency of light.
I am fascinated by the associations between naming, representation and meaning; moreover, that these connections are constantly diffused and unstable. Cosmoses experiments with ideas of absence and presence, suggested not only by the expansive voids of black and white background but also, for instance, by the inclusion of the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in the titles. Given the parallel interpretations of the signifier ‘cosmos,’ I have attempted to blend these into cohesion from the origin of the origami cosmos as a representation of a real flower, that through exposure onto photographic paper, forms an indexical trace to the cosmos as an ordered, harmonious whole.
[1]Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art”, 1972.
Medium:
Ilfochrome print mounted on aluminium
Dimensions:
30 by 40 inches
Edition Sizes:
Each Cosmoses print is unique