Wednesday, 29 June- The Blanket Weave

I have come to the realization that loneliness is nothing but an illusion. When asked "Who are you?", a typical response is that the "I" we think of, is a kind of secluded operator that controls our bodies from our mind which is completely separate. Our descriptions fall immensely short of who we are though. They contain nothing about our internal organs, the way we breathe, they say nothing about how life is impossible without our place in time and space or interacting with other people/things. We wouldn't think of a flower without a stalk connecting it to soil and without water to soak into the soil to make the flower grow. So why do we think of ourselves entirely removed from our surrounds? Philosopher Alan Watts, suggests that we are each like individual threads in the blanket of reality. If we pull, tighten, damage one thread then other threads clump around them or break away.  Reality is woven together in pattern.

That is perhaps the most well-phrased reasoning behind my current work with patterns. Interaction with the author of this blog http://www.thinkpast.com/ , and my interest in, the similarly candid poetry of Allen Ginsberg, makes me re-examine my usage of pattern. Rather than using them to criticize dogma I would now like to turn these works into a dark reflection of modern reality. So in doing this I have adopted the circle concept of a Tibetan, Buddhist mandala (which represents that inter-connectedness of reality. http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/things/mandalas.htm)

So I begun by drawing lots of patterns on grid paper, like in the last post. Now I have increased the complexity of design.

 

Finally, I would like to find a manner of printing or copying them in a way that I can retain the complex design and make tiles of them that are about 20x20cm. Then I can collage them all together, to make a poster-sized print of them all interlinking. I will then merge the patterns with photos or images representing other aspects of reality.