Utopia, perfection and illusion are some of the ideas I wanted to explore with Visions of Promise. I recently stumbled upon the work of Ernst Haeckel and was fascinated by the beauty of his drawings and his obsessive desire to find rational structures in everything he observed. As an artist I have always been interested in creating imaginary spaces that are both real and unreal, these works represent my exploration of that space.

Drawing from Haeckel and from my computer programs I started to create structures that I felt capture a sense of order, beauty and utopian perfection. With each piece, I have started with a structure, repeating and folding that structure upon itself using iterations of change in the underlying mathematical structure of the object. I wanted to create objects that felt both pictorial and physical, to varying degrees in each image. I am interested in blending these different realities as a way of exploring the connections between. I think of my life, living in an urban, controlled space, at once separate from and yet still part of the natural world. Or, of my relationships, people who I see regularly are not necessarily as vivid as online relationships. Friends are closer based not on physical location but on activity.

Through these works I hope to slow down the viewer, draw them in and have them consider issues of perception, reality and the value of the object. Far from being a scientifically accurate artist, Haeckel changed the subject to fit his concept of beauty. He used the guise of science and realism to make his vision believable.