This is the title of one of my new collections of NFTs on Opensea. The works are an integral part of the development of my current visual research and I am in the process of animating some of them for projection. Taking the ideas from earlier works – inklings of forms that I really cannot fathom the source of, but which seem to have their own logic as they develop.
These marbling experiments began when I was doing my M.A. in Fine Art at Sunderland between 2005 and 2007 at a time when I was musing upon notions of order and chaos. I’d read a lot of existential philosophers some years earlier, Sartre, Heidegger, Kiekegaard and so was musing on ideas of freewill – which was the main thread of my MA degree show and therefore my works were visual musings on order / chaos, determinism / freewill.
For what I hope are obvious reasons, marbling seemed to be a good visual metaphor for the depiction of chaos. That this patterning should be so popular for bookbinding I felt was no accident – how the fluidity seems to echo thought, trains of thought, experience, consciousness all mutable and shifting, flowing with dynamics of new colours as ideas.
My own early experiments with marbling paper were used to bind artist books carrying on the subject area of my M.A. in my library installation, Further Reading at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2007-8. Off cuts were used in collages on graph paper.
This collage of marbling on graph paper and this marbled ball-type structure were made in my Leeds studio back in 2009 as part of my development of a body of work I titled Screen Play.
The new digital collages available as 1/1 editions on Opensea are direct developments of these works, but they also correspond to the idea of a mind-manifesting in depth of thought whilst also taking in outside influences.
Towards my practice-based PhD on the revivals of nineteenth century imagery in the late 1960s I have looked at the various forms of transcendence, e.g. through psychedelic drugs and Transcendental Meditation – and why these older imageries somehow articulated these departures. And as far as I have researched, departure is the key – for it is a departure to another reality that of the past, which crossed and still crosses over with our own in the traces of Victorian culture, architecture, clothing etc that remain in contemporary life.
Recognising the lilting lines of Art Nouveau as parts of the revival and the Victorian end-paper as visually connecting to the amorphous lines of the liquid light show – the rendering of these segments as facets, sequentially distorted and centred in a globe structure seemed a good metaphor for a thought.
Thought Metaphors 1-14 currently available on OpenSea as part of Psychedelic Disko Flux.
T-shirts available through shroomies.uk – hit the sticker to enter!
the mutability cantos 
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