while i was working on assembling this piece, these
1001 clouds, i stumbled across a quote that resonated with both what i wanted the piece to do, and with the difficulties i was having in trying to articulate those intentions:
How to describe a world that evades us, not because it is ungraspable but, on the contrary, because there is too much to grasp? †
each of these polaroids, up close and in isolation, offers the world made miniature; limitless complexity and ceaseless motion bound and frozen within a fixed and stable frame.
the illusion of knowledge and the intimacy of possession.
but how to maintain this isolation with its fellows pressing in on you, a thousand others jostling for your attention or floating in the sidelines, all of them just as rich, all offering the same intimacy of knowledge? and so attention pulls back, detail and particularity at one scale lost or subsumed so that a different kind of knowing may take its place.
singularity offered up for the creation of something larger...
until a detail catches your eye...
the expansion and contraction of the scale of attention, a motion that is somewhat like breathing, makes room for an awareness of something beyond the range of either scale alone.
{Amy Patterson is a Master of Visual Arts candidate at the South Australian School of Art.}
† Blanchot, as cited in Golding, S. (1997) The Eight Technologies Of Otherness New York: Routledge p.11
