Hariclia Michailidou
Work Statement
As if everything loves to turn in a circle, within the atomic and within the cosmic, turning rapturously round and round, stars burst into light, lighting up heaven. Their light, turning and spreading through heaven from the beginning, made patterns, starting with the very first star.
My work, spontaneous and, I should add, guided by the wisdom of night dreams, begins in much the same way. In the late 90s, I painted with watercolors inside the church and in Central Park. Soon, without realizing it, I began to paint only the light in both spaces, I painted circles of light that grew larger and more perfect as I continued.
In 2001, I scanned the watercolors and began to make radial patterns, cutting and pasting them on the computer, using Photoshop. Later I grouped them together like star constellations and projected a multitude of them onto my computer screen. I started to play, compressing and expanding them. Suddenly, I zoomed in and I saw some of those patterns lit up like stars and galaxies. I knew than that what I was seeing was cosmic - it was the universe.
That was the beginning of a more than twenty-year voyage into space. I blew up stars and merged galaxies, at will or haphazardly. I kept discovering new realms and kept modifying them into new cosmic visions by rendering space malleable. I sculpted them by warping them, much the way galaxies warp one another.
I created many series, each with a multitude of variations.
This is a fragment from my book
"From Formless to All Form"
Poetics of Space
It was maybe the inherent need of human nature to understand the nature of the world; the universe within and the universe without that presented to me the possibility to create this work.
My work, for the last twenty years, has been a continuous evolution beginning from watercolor circles representing reflections of light, (since light the formless acquires the form of its source, a star been a sphere) and their cyclic motions to creating a continuous evolution in forms or states of formation. While working on this project it seemed to me as if all form is a continuous evolution of the reflections upon reflections of light and its motion throughout the cosmos. I see light as strings of photospheres, every photosphere as a sphere of light self reflect ing in all directions.
I believe that in this unique and particular quality of light to self reflect, to be mirror and mirror image at the same time, which allows light to be a particle and a wave simultaneously. Due to this particular quality of light all manifestations of form from the atomic to the galactic, from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic are possible.
My work sometimes by accident and other times intentionally, continuously progressed with new surprises, exciting possibilities, unexpected outcomes and endless variations.
I think as the earth rotates every 24 hours around its axis and revolves every 365 days around the sun; as our galaxy moves in a spiral motion and the heavens move around us, with us – maybe all the reflections upon reflections of light coming even from far away heavenly objects, they playfully recreate our beautiful universe over and over again.
Now if the universe as we know it, is continuously recreated in the light, or is a mirror image of a universe created in light, what other universe or universes can simultaneously coexist? Perhaps there are realms far beyond our minds can grasp! Imagine the life forms they might support! Real-like mirages moving in streams of light vibrations, yet synthesized from the same universal light and obeying the same laws of the nature of light; they might seem quite familiar to us. In my work, I continuously discover - by modifying cosmic realm after cosmic realm - those mirages which truly resemble forms that are familiar to us.
Could the understanding and contemplation of such worlds be the destiny of our true nature?