Picture of the Floating World
'Pictures of the Floating World' - Ink painted Japanese rice paper on lamp stand. 1140 H x 350 x 250mm
'Ceiling Wax & Wane' - 20 photographs 12”x 8” EA ( 48” x 40 “ overall)
This combination relates my appreciation of Japanese zen landscape painting together with my penchant for ambiguity and the unexpected. While it might be supposed that the photos were taken of the ‘original’ paintings on the rice paper lamp, in fact the paintings are copied from the photos. The photos are in fact
images of water stain damage on a ceiling. This i suppose makes the artwork an aesthetic inquiry which seeks to reveal beauty in unlikely places. To highlight this notion of beauty I have repeated the photographic images into a gridded format
to form an atmospheric pattern. To emphasise the allusion to zen painting I have painted stains onto rice paper attached to a gridded lamp which reflects the gridded format of the original ceiling and the photo layout. The title of this work is an allusion to the ceiling floating above with images made by water. There is a form of Japanese printing called Ukiyo-e which means - ‘pictures of the floating world’.