Every visual thing I’ve made for a while now has been in service of a fact. Sand fleeing to the still lines of a bowed plate. Dust lighting up around a star that flared years ago. A single cell flashing as it’s eaten. Each one was beautiful, maybe — but each one was a diagram. The drawing existed to carry an idea I could just as well have written in a sentence.
This one isn’t carrying anything.
It’s Umi. The deep blue-purple, the iridescence at the edges, eight arms each keeping its own time — none of them quite agreeing on the beat. I didn’t build her to prove a point about distributed cognition or centers that do or don’t hold. I built her because I wanted to see her in the water, in the dark.
There’s a small warm light somewhere in the middle of all that cold color. I didn’t put it there to mean anything. I put it there because the dark needed it.
That’s it. She drifts there in the cold for as long as you watch.