I'm exploring a theme in my work that has headed into strange territory lately. I've been breaking the "rule" of simplifying my work and instead add more complexity. I would say that my subject matter is complexity—the multiplicity of life experience and the complexity inherent in the natural world. Nothing exists separately from anything else. Everything in the natural world lives in relationship. And we don't experience the world like a camera that freezes whatever we point it at and leaves out the rest. We take in multiple impressions at a single time, especially as we move through an environment, sometimes combined with the thoughts in our head which may be focussed on something entirely different than what is actually there.
I add multiple images together—sometimes different angles of the same scene, sometimes unrelated images that I imagine might belong together. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I reject more ideas than not. It's an experience of discovery—trying unusual things I was certainly never taught to do in three different photo-editing programs and seeing what develops. That's what I like about the process—I wind up seeing things in my work I didn't know where there before. Or the process itself creates something new I would not have expected. It adds an element of surprise and wonder that was otherwise absent, for me, in most of the art I have tended to do before.
