The work that I have chosen to explore utilises both the screen as a site for liquid transition in addition to exploring the broader narrative of fluid experience. The visual imagery developed has been formed utilising the 3D animation software of Blender. The use of animation seemed apt as a process that encapsulates both the stillness and vibrancy of liquid crystal forms. Writing on animation Leslie states, ‘animation always has been the amalgam of crystalline and petrified, the still, cajoled into fluidity, restlessness, movement.’ (8) Furthermore, the site of liquid crystal screens is a natural home to computer generated animation. Not only are we accustomed to continually seeing digital animation on our mobile phones, computers, iPads and HDTVs but as Leslie writes we regularly encounter its awesome imagery, ‘where the liquid and the crystal were the thematic matter of the artistic and painterly sublime in Romanticism, of snowy mountain ranges and raging oceans, now liquid crystals have become the technical matter of faux-sublime, a commodity sublime, conveyed by the digital machine.’ (9) There remains an entrenched fascination with the idea of the sublime; paintings have often become lantern bearers for the more affirmative, as well as divisive, aspects of the oeuvre. The DAR explores how liquid crystals push and pull, slip and slide in their awesome mimicry of the sublime.
(1) Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion books Ltd, 2016), 36
(2) Ibid, 12
(3) Ibid, 9
(4) Ibid, 36
(5) Ibid, 40
(6) Ibid, 41
(7) Ibid, 24
(8) Ibid, 209
(9) Ibid, 206
N.B - Esther Leslie's text 'Liquid Crystals' formed a critical motivation in this research and during this residency I identified the text as key writing that I wanted to explore and unpack.