Future Studies from the Insides of Octopus rubescens, 2019

Future Studies from the Insides of Berghia stephanieae, 2019

Commission for Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.

 

These relief paper-cut drawings are a kind of visual “poetic specimen” that take advantage of analogies such as inside/outside -- land/body -- map/anatomy. Geographic maps of the earth miniaturize their subject, and through that abstraction something very vast can be perceived on a human scale. The Future Studies series takes advantage of this quality of cartography, so that the knowledge/meaning recorded in this map can be contained in within the body of a relatively smaller animal (such as an octopus or nudibranch). I have used the word “future” in the presentation of a low-tech, hand-made paper sculpture as a to confound ideas of knowledge being related to progress – is it true that the future implies more complexity and/or better understanding?