Time Keeps On Slipping

This is the first time in a long time that I've felt like incorporating words into my work.



(Those are loose little bits, set to dry there so they'd have a slightly curved surface.)

I've been giving some things titles, even though I generally don't like it when things have titles.



This photo greatly flattens out the curve of the piece, which dips about four inches in from the rim to the bottom, though you can see that it's curved by the way the light curves into the space.



Hard to see, I know. There are a few attached bits in there that will be supplemented with another two dozen or more unattached pieces. I want them to be removable so they can be handled and rearranged.

Someone at the studio asked me if these cells are modeled after actual cells. That's an easy and a hard question to answer. There's the cell membrane with embedded bits and the nucleus, double walled of course. But mostly what is there is a lot of mystery and mysterious parts because that's what studying cells at that level meant to me. I mean: How do you get from looking at the parts of a cell to understanding what that part does within the cell and how it goes about doing that thing (interacting with other parts or producing something or breaking something down)? That's interesting stuff. What I'm trying to get at is that sense of curiosity and the early part of devising an approach to satisfying that curiosity.

Where do the words come in? Sometimes they're simply aping textbook labels, which are often cryptic if you don't already know what you're looking at. Sometimes they're bits of Shakespearean sonnets--but why? Because there is that same sense of having to focus on something in order to understand it when one reads Shakespeare, the sense of having to look past something (the words themselves) to see it (the meaning)--though of course the two are intimately connected. Sometimes the words are bits of verbal flotsam related to time because as I've been working I've thought about how cells and parts of cells manipulate and manage time and the timing of various events within a cell (when to self-destruct, for example, or the timing of enzymatic processes).