Artist statement for
Whole and Some of Its Parts
Summary
These images bring together terrestrial and celestial Parts to encourage, or maybe inspire, a personal experience of The Whole.
Your experience as the viewer is the final creative step.
This is a conceptual project that uses digital image compositing to convey a visual narrative between terrestrial and celestial realms. The terrestrial-celestial couplings are selected based on their visual synergies such as drama, color, and form—treating their ‘actual’ physical scales as irrelevant. They convey the truth that they are actually, regardless of scale, all of the same grand existence—that is, The Whole.
All elements of the composite images are photographic renderings of our experience of reality—a reality carried out by the Universe and revealed to us by our senses. Senses that are amplified by our instruments; cameras, drone cameras, satellites, and space telescopes.
Regardless of source or scale, our senses and instruments can’t view The Whole from outside of It because they exist solely within It. For us to experience The Whole, we have access to the parts through our senses and instruments as well as our intuition and creative imagination. Enabled by those, we yearn for The Whole and its transcendence because we intuitively sense that “The Whole is greater than the sum of its parts," and it's the greater that feeds our creative imagination.
The goal of this project is to encourage, or maybe inspire, a personal experience of The Whole. Your experience as the viewer is the final creative step.
Acknowledgment
The terrestrial part of each composite image is from my camera or drone, and the celestial part is from NASA’s Hubble telescope, Webb telescope, satellites, etc. NASA makes their images available for such uses. I edit and composite the images in software including Photoshop, Lightroom, and Topaz. See the credits document for full NASA image credits.
Whole and Some of Its Parts
Summary
These images bring together terrestrial and celestial Parts to encourage, or maybe inspire, a personal experience of The Whole.
Your experience as the viewer is the final creative step.
This is a conceptual project that uses digital image compositing to convey a visual narrative between terrestrial and celestial realms. The terrestrial-celestial couplings are selected based on their visual synergies such as drama, color, and form—treating their ‘actual’ physical scales as irrelevant. They convey the truth that they are actually, regardless of scale, all of the same grand existence—that is, The Whole.
All elements of the composite images are photographic renderings of our experience of reality—a reality carried out by the Universe and revealed to us by our senses. Senses that are amplified by our instruments; cameras, drone cameras, satellites, and space telescopes.
Regardless of source or scale, our senses and instruments can’t view The Whole from outside of It because they exist solely within It. For us to experience The Whole, we have access to the parts through our senses and instruments as well as our intuition and creative imagination. Enabled by those, we yearn for The Whole and its transcendence because we intuitively sense that “The Whole is greater than the sum of its parts," and it's the greater that feeds our creative imagination.
The goal of this project is to encourage, or maybe inspire, a personal experience of The Whole. Your experience as the viewer is the final creative step.
Acknowledgment
The terrestrial part of each composite image is from my camera or drone, and the celestial part is from NASA’s Hubble telescope, Webb telescope, satellites, etc. NASA makes their images available for such uses. I edit and composite the images in software including Photoshop, Lightroom, and Topaz. See the credits document for full NASA image credits.
Narrative & Interpretive Digital Images and Text © Kurt Lightfoot – all rights reserved