The decision to buy the old house and dairy barn was based solely on its studio potential. In the kitchen was a countertop at right angles to the wall onto which I decided to attach a circular kitchen table, the plywood substrate I was cutting would require a right-angled section to attach the circle onto the side of the rectangular countertop. Soon afterwards, the curious shape - a circlesquare - began finding its way into the studio where both formal and narrative suggestions now continue through metaphor and tropes. As with the mule, another hybrid, the circlesquare can be as awkward to work with as it is to look at. This chimerical and conflicted shape adopts and frames up polemical arguments; its square portion posited against its circular portion, as in Tableau Vivante or Chardin’s Bubble.
Hegel and Merleau-Ponte tell me that opposites in conflict resolve as an experiential hybrid - a “phenomenon.” In the peaceable kingdom of geometry, the triangle rests between the circle and the square, as does the cone between the sphere and cube. However, when circle and square occupy the same space (quantum superposition) their inherent argument spills out onto the streets making manifest the “virtual”. With the circular portion as the cone’s base, the shape’s right angles augur towards the conical point - the apex of a virtual cone.
In Noumenon/Big Trout or Interiority, framed within the teardrop shaped canvas, three interior divisions activate a convex/concave cubical corner. These edges, then, frame up and prompt the reading of a protean illusory form; the three-dimensional circlesquare, or “spherecube”.
In this excerpt from an interview, I retold this dream for use in an exhibition announcement, “Introducing the Hybrid”. While the kitchen table story (above) and this dream (below) argue over which “virtually” came into being first … the dream story is as follows:
I remember the dream being very simple. I was standing in a space devoid of anything but myself. I was holding in my arms something about the size of bread basket. It was both spherical and cubical. That is, both were evident in the form simultaneously. All parts were both spherical and cubical [and] at the same time making neither wholly.
’I remember standing there just smiling, being incredibly happy, just holding it in my arms. It was rather iridescent, silvery iridescent. And sort of like, ‘this is mine. I’ve got it! It seemed important. Sort of like catching a huge trout.