Gallery artist Grant Fergeson talks about his newest series, Liquid Light.
To see this series click here.
These ten images are natural expressions of energy and pattern, created but not controlled. The photographs are not manipulated except for contrast and tone, thus showing the visual information available as I saw it. The patterns are the result of the complex motion of a water surface reflected onto paper.
The idea for this series of images came to me as I walked by a stream near Moab, Utah one late afternoon. The surface of the stream was dark, and the sun illuminated the small canyon with a warm slanting light. My path went along the water's edge; a wall of sandstone rose from the opposite bank arching over the stream. The rock overhang was alive with light in a constantly changing show of geometric forms in motion. After watching until the sun had slipped too low to create the effect anymore, I realized that I was seeing something that had been available to any eyes that could see it for millennia and wondered what it might have meant in the absence of the our modern understanding. This series is an attempt to recreate and capture this experience.
Creating conditions wherein more or less unconstrained physical forces express coherent forms offers a chance to examine a fundamental source of information. Perhaps these types of natural geometries contributed to the evolution of intelligence or to the recognition of familiar shapes and, thus, relationships between separate phenomena, providing pathways to abstract concepts. Humans are specialists in pattern recognition, and exposure to organically generated patterned data, visual or otherwise, might be a significant precursor to forming original ideas. By transferring these natural patterns directly to photographs and omitting evocative titles, I encourage viewers to absorb and spontaneously interpret these forms.
Grant Fergeson
February 18, 2015