Note from a sketchbook, April 2019:

“A video of wallpaper falling words
over wall, running like a mushroom trip
dissolving in and out of being, slippage,
hallucination pure pattern mounting toward dreaminess.

Ornament leads viewer…”

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years: bring my drawings to life, creating wallpaper where words are ephemeral, where pattern cascades, whorls, exhales. To realize this I worked closely with my partner, musician Jayson Kochan, to animate digitized scans and collages of my drawings. The pattern is one I created inspired by elements of a wallpaper design by Walter Crane. I was drawn to his hyper-stylization of folds, waves, ever-winding lines—almost nothing in Crane’s work is straight. I wanted to further accentuate that sensation of intricate floridity through repetition and movement.

We settled on a shifting, cycling jeweltone color palette: The rich, ethereal quality of violet. Myriad greens of the vegetal world (also a reference to arsenic as both periodic element and the chemical used to dye green Victorian wallpaper). The brassy golds and dusty rose of autumnal leaves. The quote for this piece comes from Emilie du Chatelet, 18th century mathematician, physicist and author: ”Let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.” Among du Chatelet’s substantial CV are publications on the science of light, mathematic theories on kinetic energy, a discourse on the nature of happiness (which fiercely advocated for women’s education), a critical analysis of the entire Bible, and a translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia (which remains the standard French translation of the work to this day). One of the craters of Venus is named after her, as is a minor planet. Her influence on the philosophical and scientific conversations of the time was vital, respected, and often hotly debated. She spent over a decade partnered with Voltaire: the couple regularly collaborated on scientific studies in a laboratory at her home. In short, du Chatelet defied the rigid structures and stereotypes of her era, and this quote reverberates with the elegance of her approach to both life and scientific exploration.

Twinning this video is the graphite drawing Science Is Real. I think the sentiment behind it is self-evident: between climate change, pandemic, and the proliferation of technical confections large and small, the perceived gap between science and compassion, survival, faith, and art has increasingly shrunken to the point of collapse. I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate that fluidity in this drawing, which melds softness with hardness.