Ideas, braids, snakes and ladders

Part five in a series, see parts #1, #2, #3, #4, and #6

A larger departure in style this week.

Something of the forest, something of rivers and streams. Something constricting.

I’ve been thinking about ideas as braids in a river, diverging and converging. How do you track the movement of an idea in such a homogeneous flow?

Looking at it I get the feeling of something being obscured, like all the interleaved lines are covering up the better nothing that lies beyond it. There’s something of the dense natural blockades of manuka, broom, blackberry, and gorse that we push through daily at work, it too reaches upwards to the sky. Maybe what it obscures is above, not beyond1.

I like that it is difficult to trace a point of origin in this drawing, every tendril is circuitously connected to every other limb, with the single exception of the one that enters the frame from the left and terminates in space just before reaching the top right corner. Speculation as to whether that strand connects to the whole in the realm beyond the frame is left to the viewer.

  1. Hey, maybe I’m developing a knack for writing the sort of art-wank that galleries print on plaques and litter their halls with to make gobbledygook of everything and condescendingly imply you’re wrong.↩︎