Protean Particle Panoply

Protean Particle Panoply is a cluster of digital painting collages that work at the threshold of visibility, where a structure is too small to see and still has to solve the same problems as a building. Radiolarian skeletons, cellular membranes, tissue cross-sections, the self-organizing geometries of single-celled organisms: forms whose hexagonal lattices, branching networks and spherical symmetries are the structural logic of life at its smallest scale.

Working digitally allowed fast exploration of colour relationships, spatial depth and three-dimensional form, which made these conceptual studies for sculptural and architectural-scale work rather than finished statements in themselves. Two of the five, Microcosmic and Intrastellar, are renderings of radiolarian structure rather than convergences with it.

The spherical and network structures here went on to set the formal vocabulary for the larger body of work, on the proposition that the geometries organizing a single cell are the same geometries capable of organizing a room, a courtyard, or a building.