Strange Attractors

About

I exhibited a series of artworks through the Sydney Children's Hospital exhibition program.

I used a program called Ultra Fractal along with Adobe Photoshop to create the images.

Artist statement

In my creative work as a photographer and digital artist, elements of nature, spirituality and interconnectedness are recurring themes. For this exhibition I’ve created a series of “fractal mandalas”.

A fractal is a special kind of pattern which is formed by repeating a simple shape over and over again. This results in a complex design that is “self similar” – meaning that each part of the shape is a scaled down

version of the whole. Fractal geometry occurs often in nature, with snowflakes, tree branches and the veins on leaves being some examples.

A mandala is a spiritual symbol which represents the universe. Mandalas are used by Buddhists and Hindus to help meditation and trance induction, as a spiritual teaching tool, and to establish a sacred space. The symbols used within them have the purpose of linking the “outer world” to the “inner world”– thereby encouraging viewers to realise the interconnectedness of all things.

“Strange Attractors” is a term borrowed from the study of Physics. In Physics, an attractor is defined as “a set of physical properties toward which a system tends to evolve, regardless of the starting conditions of

the system”. Strange attractors are attractors formed in a chaotic manner. Chaotic behavior (a concept often referred to as “the butterfly effect”) can be observed in most real physical systems of nature, such as

the weather and in the actual orbits of planets.

The artworks were inspired by this poem:

Strange Attractors

by Robin S. Chapman

How to find them, those regions

Of space where the equation traces

Over and over a kind of path,

Like the moth that batters its way

Back toward the light

Or, hearing the high cry of the bat,

Folds its wings in a rolling dive?

And ourselves, fluttering toward and away

In a pattern that, given enough

Dimensions and point-of-view,

Anyone living there could plainly see

Dance and story, advance, retreat,

A human chaos that some slight

Early difference altered irretrievably?

For one, the sound of her mother

Crying. For this other,

The hands that soothed

When he was sick. For a third,

The silence that collects

Around certain facts. And this one,

Sent to bed, longing for a nightlight.

Though we think this time to escape,

Holding a head up, nothing wrong,

Finding a way to beat the system,

Talking about anything else—

Travel, the weather, time

At the flight simulator--for some

The journey circles back

To those strange, unpredictable attractors

Secrets we can neither speak nor leave.