Pleiades

This editioned series is a meditation on wayfinding and self-discovery, inspired by an ongoing personal quest for deep understanding of self. The artwork draws its title from the Greek name for a constellation which has been used by many cultures for wayfinding over the course of human history, the Pleiades or ‘Seven Sisters.’

Wayfinding is as much about understanding who is looking for direction as it is figuring out in which direction to go. This rhymes with the mathematical concept of domain and range. If we have a function that performs an operation, the domain of that function consists of all the inputs, and the range, all the outputs. Even if the function itself is kept constant, changing the domain may result in wildly different outputs. Moreover, knowing the range tells us nothing about the domain. The function may remain constant, yet as the path of inputs shifts, its trail of outputs dances in new directions.

Pleiades plays with these math principles and applies them to wayfinding. If ‘where you are going’ is the range, and ‘how you get there’ is the function, ‘who you are’ is the domain and therefore of the utmost importance. The texture of each piece arises from nothing more than twisting, folding, warping and squashing the ‘domain’ of the image. In this way, each edition of the work itself is a direct visualization of just how important inputs can be, and motivation for deeper understanding of self.

Mathematics once again provides a helpful framework: In linear algebra, a collection of vectors is described by its “basis”, or a subset of such vectors that can be combined in different ways to produce any vector in the collection. So, self-awareness is about understanding what the basis vectors of your identity are.

Building on this concept, each work in Pleiades is a variation born from the same seven seeds, or 'basis editions', which are combined in various proportions determined by the hash of a minted piece.