Study images by Todd Hainline. Microscopic photos of Starfish, Sea Urchins, and a sand dollar. Circles found in ocean life-
Breathing circles (still from looped video)
Key ideas of the Double Motive of the Circle project.
Within each of the series of the Double Motive of the Circle drawings, one of the works is filmed while making it and later it is filmed while it is being burned. The ashes are collected from it and added to the ink in order to make the next set of drawings. The ongoing series of drawings will always be in a constant state of change. Burning the work contributes to the cyclical process. Fire purifies, cleanses, and returns the materials back to the earth and the atmosphere.
By starting a drawing with a transparent circle of water on a sheet of white paper the idea of the circle gently shifts from metaphysical to empirical. Then the process of completing the drawing to the final passage of burning it allows the work to transition back to metaphysical. It becomes a memory and an idea while being looped in a cyclical process. Both the drawing and the burning of it add to facilitate contemplation of the circle as perfect and flawed, as well as here and not here.
Human beings are odd when it comes to the fact that many times we value what we don’t have over what we do have. Due to the making then burning of my work, my relationship to it shifts between emotions of loss and peaceful release.
When I draw these images I become a humble participant adjacent to natural forces of gravity, air, heat, light, and fire. I stage conditions so that my participation in the work is reduced and significant aspects of the work happen without my interaction. For example, the gravity within the tight paper surfaces gives agency to the differentiated viscosity of the water, ink, and ash that slowly drift and dry accordingly to their own natures.
This project shows the double motive of the circle as caught between two worlds: the real one versus the metaphysical one that is perfect, stable, and unchanging. In contemplation we become caught in an in-between space, a kind of no-man’s land. The circle is a shape that spans all time has consistently existed in tension between what we see versus what we think we see.
The fluid irregularities of the circle are inseparable elements from its relationship to perfection. It establishes a transcendent connection between it and us, and the completeness that we also crave to achieve. The circle is, in a sense, both flawless and constituted by flaw. Its ubiquitous existence in nature reminds us of the faithful purposes that it never ceases to serve, its way of always renewing itself.
The fact that no two are alike allows me to continuously mentally drift into new spaces. Each irregularity is means of going to a new place and experiencing it with a fresh mind and eyes for the first time. With every empirical circle I create I feel I push myself closer to the idea of the original one. In my art practice, the act of creating circles is a way of reaching towards the sublime, or producing a visual conversation with it.
THE CIRCLE AS IDEA
At first it appears in our minds as motionless, but viewing it with a sustained mindfulness toward ambiguity reveals its ability to be also in continual motion. It is primordial, eternal, unchanging and sincere.
The familiarity of the circle has roots in how we see as much as what we see. We see an irregular one while we think of a perfect one. Human beings have attempted to tame our environment by constructing with straight lines and rectangular planes, when in fact the circle has consistently proved to be a most useful and intuitive tool.
It is mysterious, contradictory, being both tangible and intangible. It sets boundaries and offers protection. It has a center, though one notoriously impossible to define.
Although there are no true circles among the polygons, the higher the number of sides one has, the more closely it approaches circle-ness; and in Edwin Abbot Abbot’s book Flatland those forms are referred to as such in recognition of their intelligence, education, and power - for their well roundedness and perfection.
Divine knowledge is actually here in front of us in our human world.
Because pi is a transcendental number, its inherent relationship the circle establishes, ramifies, and reinforces the infinite nature of the circle itself. Similar to Zeno’s paradox we will never reach the end. As an irrational number, it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern. And so will our use and understanding of the circle ———and our relationship with it.
THE EMPIRICAL CIRCLE
The act of making a circle begins with a point – a microscopic circle. The same point that produces a circle is a circle; the circle makes itself. It is an autonomous narcissistic icon. (see Lexicon of the circle)
The visible circle’s minute flaws – its irregularities are what give it its beauty. They are what that demand our sustained viewing.
“Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of my body; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body.” Merleau Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception
The body is made up of the very stuff of the world. Our physical bodies are containers of massive amounts of circles, literally forming and reflecting the framework of the cyclical life process. “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles)
Circles are under our feet, in the night sky, inside our bodies. The ingredients for life are Circular: Earth. Moon. Sun. Cell. Seed. Egg. Their ubiquitous presence is evident, protecting and blanketing the edge of its many diameters. The flaws in every empirical circle produce flux – a continual flow of change, a quality true and necessary to sustain life. When one circle succumbs, it renews itself in another one.
When I toss a pebble into a pool I can make many of them. It is one of the first things children draw, what babies most readily fixate on. Slice an orange or an onion and they appear. Peacock feathers, mushroom caps, and wings of moths. My own iris that gazes at all of them.
Body - We see out of a circle and know that the horizon forms part of a larger one. When a round cell of an egg becomes fertile it can produce life. Round red cells multiply by two million per second and are sent off to run though the cylindrical conduits of our veins.
Nature - We can tell the age of a tree by counting them. Bees deliver the round pollen that nurture nature and sustain it.
Objects - Rolling, a circle helps us move from one place to another. When one is placed on a dinner table it never needs to be turned before putting food on it because there is no wrong position. We put one of them on our finger for love and commitment, and the Dodge of Venice threw one into the sea as a ceremonial act of marrying the Adriatic. It is capable of reproducing sound when a needle is placed on it and it spins at 33 rpm’s. It gets kicked around on a field and unites players of the game.
Earth, planets - Our round terrestrial satellite forms part of a spinning, rotating solar system with architectonics of circle. A distant yellow orange one 93,000,000 miles away warms our skin and sets the conditions for life. At night there is a tiny and very distant one that always lets us know where north is. The nearest satellite, when in its full roundness, has guided people at night and pushed and pulled at the sea.
Primordial - They were here much before we were, they surround us now, and if we cease to exist, they will exist hereafter. We have shared inhabitance of space from the beginning of time.
Change, mutation, unpredictability, transitions and so on are the elements that make us. We are exceptionally vulnerable. When we let the elements of life chip away at us rounding us off like an erosion process, we become complete. The circle facilitates fluidity, avoiding stoppage and stagnation.
In any event, the circle has consistently proved to be the most powerful of shapes available to us to work with. From the invention of the wheel to the first clocks, and cultures organizing themselves in socio-political societies – perhaps a circular attempt toward harmony –the circle has transported and organized us in the most practical, useful, and meaningful ways. It is in its very nature. It is the shape that is the most efficient and enduring for survival: it uses the minimal possible amount to enclose a given volume.
Aside from its practical uses in the empirical world, of all shapes the circle is most naturally satisfying due to the genetic architecture of our vision. The human eye naturally focuses on the part of the peripheral vision field known as the fovea. We scan in the shape of a circle. In other words, the human eye does not see in the rectangles that architects most commonly rely on to construct inhabitable space.
Mandalas constructed in sand are swept into an urn and dispersed into flowing water when they have served their intended purpose within the confines of meditation – a way of extending their healing powers to the whole world. The act is one of giving back to earth to re-energize the environment and universe. A cyclical act, a circle: an inner and outer reality of ourselves and the universe itself.
The unpredictability, the irregularity, and the continuous changing nature of the circle itself are what endlessly stimulate my interest. From my perspective, the fact that the circle exists in a state of flux makes it the shape that best reflects our own nature and experience. Its abundant presence in both “natural” and human-made domains reveals that it is as a core piece of the design of the universe. The circle is a reflection of our own quest for completion. Yet the empirical circle’s nature also mirrors our own unpredictability, our irregularities, our continuous, changing nature. However I don’t see those as undesirable imperfections – they are an integral part of nature’s design as much as the existence of the circle itself.
In the empirical world, stagnation is a conduit for lack of purity, stoicism, dormancy, and lifelessness. The circle does not facilitate stagnation. It wears a disguising mask of perfection and has a capricious nature. And because of that it is the most powerful tool and a useful source of knowledge: Perhaps the shape of the divine itself. Circles are undermined and unmapped – a laboratory of marvels that I explore relentlessly in my work.
The drawings act as devices of contemplation, helping us to reckon with the rational and metaphysical order of the universe itself. The work provides a pragmatic understanding that true completion consists of recognizing the impossibility of our own search and allowing two realities to coexist. We keep traversing the circumference, without a starting or ending point, arriving again and again at a space of zero displacement but with infinite journeys stacking up inside us – but we never reach the end. The circle is what unites me, and you with the world around us, and with higher orders of thought. The circle is equity made visible and becomes a thought path towards the making of equality among all of us.
Circle and light study
Circle study