Building the Vessel

The vessel is a concept to describe the stages of life as one journeys toward a spiritual life. The idea of building the vessel is the first half of half where I trained and became a scientist, contributed knowledge and lived an ego-based life. In the second half , I needs to let go and begin to grow spiritually beyond the vessel, unpacking the laden cargo that I no longer need that weighs down my journey.

My last few series have used biological stains as a new art medium (Micrographia, Is the Big Bang God, Cosmic Dancer, Cosmic Mystery). Building the Vessel uses these stains to generate an abstract background of intense color that represents chaos and overlays it with parallel strips torn from my science training going (student review notes), lab notebooks etc. In some, the pages are cut to look like Greek Amphora, a symbol of the basis of Western Philosophy Unpacking the vessel is made from the first pages of published papers cut into shapes like hypercubes and paper dolls, making light of work that I viewed with such importance as I built my scientific career.

The work also represents my lifelong attempts to contain chaos with order. My earliest shows delved with this theme (From Order to Entropy, 1986) and it reflects the scientist’s need to grasp a small piece of understanding amidst a sea of unknowing.

Enthalpy