I CAN CONNECT NOTHING WITH NOTHING

In these small (24 x 17 cm) gouache works on red paper, I’ve used a system of tessellating triangles to create images that appear to swell out from and recede into the ground.  I made this series in 2012, when I was reading the work of the early 19th century Pragmatic philosopher, William James.  For James, our experience the world is not continuous, but is fragmented like a mosaic.  "Experience itself," he wrote, "can grow by its edges... one moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which... continue the experiential tissue."  I see connections between this idea, the cellular growth patterns that I observed as a research scientist, and the geometric systems with which I work.  The title of this series, I can connect nothing with nothing, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, a poem noted for its fragmented structure.