2025
PERSONAL PROJECT
(sublimation prints, linen, wood, metal, clementine peels)
As I was reflecting on the themes of Propagations — fractures, mythologies, variants, the project of naming, and the sideways looking — I recognized these concepts as recurring themes in what I’m drawn to in my creative practice. I have always been interested in how elements relate to each other in nature and society and how we create meaning by overlapping them. I decided for my piece in the show, I wanted to translate this desire I have to observe and to document in a new medium and context. I'm often drawn to moments of entanglement and contrast in my photography and writing but I’ve never embarked on a more holistic world building approach for an installation. When Stella and I were processing the upcoming show and what we wanted to make, we both brought up the idea of a mobile. It made sense for both of our concepts, how our worlds could grow and interact by cohabitation. And so we built and birthed our individual projects to live together in a shared space (eclosion, see Stella's statement / project for more).
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Colligation: the joining or linking of things together. Originates from the Latin word colligare, which means "to tie together." I came across the word colligation as I was trying to find a name for this experience of intertwining. I thought its origin story was well connected to the word itself and the concept of this project. Colligation is another name for scientific inductive reasoning, which involves establishing connections between isolated information into general propositions. Essentially, introducing a new idea based on collected data.
The word colligation was coined by William Whewell in 1840. William was thought of as a "meta-scientist" or an "Observer of Science" because of his broad array of interests and methods of research. He was committed to the philosophy of science by which the act of observing and naming collective conceptions could shape our understanding of the world. Whewell's most notable project was conducting, "The Great Tide Experiment" in 1835, where he coordinated a worldwide research project comprised of 650 volunteers, to observe and record metrics on oceanic tide activity. The experiment generated over a million data points that provided insights into tidal activity across the globe that had never been connected before. Whewell was largely unrecognized in the field of science but is most well known for inventing many words in our present day lexicon like: scientist, physicist, linguistics, astigmatism, and colligation. Today, the term colligation is most commonly used to refer to the grammatical pattern and syntactic relationship between words.
One is made of many — theory into visualization, relationship, context, and collective seeing (and sharing!) being integral to new discoveries.