Work 07 · Selected archive
Boundary Condition
Boundary Conditions
Boundary Conditions begins with photographs drawn from experiences that shaped my world at specific times. I digitally re-order and print these images, then cut them into narrow strips until the scenes lose narrative legibility and collapse into color, form, and data. Some strips are woven into a dense surface laid over an image of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light we can observe and a residual record of the early universe. Others are glued into long strands that descend and accumulate on the floor in a heap that functions as an event horizon, a threshold where the image, and the moment it came from, are no longer accessible, yet their trace persists.
CMB
Courtesy NASA
I borrow the logic of black holes and the questions they raise about description under conditions of limited access. Hawking’s work on black-hole radiation sharpened a long-running question: if a black hole can evaporate, what happens to the information about what fell in? In black-hole physics, the event horizon is not only an edge, but a boundary that sets what can be known from the outside. It is a limit on access, and a surface where what remains of an interior history is thought about in terms of traces and encoding rather than direct retrieval.
From that pressure comes the holographic principle: a conjecture in quantum gravity, made precise in certain theoretical frameworks, that what occurs in a region can be represented in boundary terms, with what we experience as “depth” treated as constructible, in principle, from that encoding. The claim is not that the universe is a simulation, but that a lower-dimensional description may fully encode what appears three-dimensional, an inside-out logic where the boundary does the work. I’m using this boundary logic as a model rather than a claim: in the theories that motivate it, the full description of a space can be encoded on an edge, and what appears as depth can be reconstructed from that encoding.
Process view: hand-cut strips
My strips operate inside this boundary logic. The original photographs, and the moments they came from, are no longer available as coherent images. What remains is a distributed trace: not retrievable as intact scenes but not simply erased. Each strand carries fragments of a moment. The work holds this tension between persistence and inaccessibility as its basic condition.
The weaving functions as a personal spacetime in the simplest sense: a field under tension, capable of being pulled, curved, and reconfigured. Likewise, past events do not remain present as discrete scenes. They persist as boundary conditions, distributed traces that constrain what becomes perceptible and how the world holds together. Perception, in this sense, is not passive reception but active construction from partial sensory data and prior experience. Boundary Conditions is a material model of how a world is met through the woven structure of what has already happened.
Process view: weaving structure in progress
Wall-based installation, 2023
Inkjet print on matte paper, hand-cut and hand-woven
Variable dimensions
Installation view, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, 2023