NOĒMA

Noēma is the name I’ve given to the small, hand-formed pieces I create from either bronze or porcelain. The term means “mental object; content of a thought”. I began making these forms in 2012. They are not made from molds, rather each unit is entirely formed by hand. Each one is completely unique as indicated by my fingerprint patterns encrypted in their material formations. They are formed with each piece concealing the concept of infinity (the lemniscate) presented as two openings integral within every form.

These shaped forms infer various structures and fragments of possible worlds interpreted and synthesized with encoded notions. They harbor biological, mathematical, and geometric conceptions. They offer references to biological bones, flowers, shells and yet echo topological geometries of the torus, knots, fractals, and other forms of theoretical quantum physics within dimensional space.

However, instead of attempting to portray any likeness, these forms pursue their own liveliness. Possessing a noetic force, each one is a uniquely formed by hand as an intentional component – a structural aspect of experience. Translated from my mind’s eye into the physical realm, their encoded physicality becomes an experience for perception as the viewer explores their materiality, terrain, shifting topologies, physical arrangements and, at times, their sonic properties. They serve as mediators ­for the act of perception by indefinitely suspending the relationship between perception and the perceived.

I often assemble large numbers of the noēma into arrangements and large installations. Porcelain noēma are simply stacked allowing their delicate edges catch, but it is their individual fragility and material thin translucency that create a strong, stabilized structure of emergence and allow for infinite arrangements. Bronze noēma are assembled into suspended installations where gravity and movement enable their bronze edges to collide to create infinite arrangements of hypnotic motion and resonance. These noēma are also uses to create paintings. Enlisted as a tool, they are dipped into paint and then vibrated across surfaces. They become a moving medium for my paintings while offering new layers of materiality and a enabling a patterned language of visible vibrations to emerge.

Regardless of arrangement or approach, their outcomes create dynamic structures containing imprints of mental acts of the mental world emerging into physical being. They are a structural aspect of experience, experience as object and agents that harbor conception of consciousness.