ENTROPY (2023)
Photography is about time and time is a visible presence in my garden. My decomposing mulch pile reminds me that things of this world are an eternal dance of waves and particles, emanations of light, re-combinations, and re-incarnations of energy. This video and the other images from this series are at once a metaphor for our layered consciousness and a reminder of eternal cycles of composition/decomposition/re-composition and our connection to, and impact on, the world around us.
Inspired by Renaissance still life paintings, representations of ‘nature mort’, Entropy developed out of my interest in the recycling of energy that happens in nature and art. The first and second laws of thermodynamics suggest that energy can be neither created or destroyed and that systems tend towards disorder and chaos. On the one hand, all that lives decomposes over time and goes back to the earth but on the other hand, complex living organisms are continually coming into being. Artists recycle energy, creating order out of disorder. My camera captures light from decaying food, and I manipulate this energy into a new form. The artist is a conduit for energy, a channel through which disorder is re-ordered in the art object. This object then has its own life. Some artifacts are more powerful than others. They act on the viewer over time regenerating energy in the form of thought. The impact of color, form and sound generates ideas in the viewer that circulate through history long after the object itself decays. The original energy finds new form through duplication and is shared, inspiring new forms that evolve and circulate through our collective consciousness.