#self-generating

When we think of existence as a non-temporal, self-generating act, we’re shifting from a linear, cause-and-effect view of the world to something much more fluid and interconnected.

Dove Bradshaw -  Indeterminacy Stones

The Indeterminacy Stones consisted of a pyrite set atop a piece of marble and left outdoors to weather. The pyrite, transformed into limonite when exposed to the elements, leaves a permanent iron rust stain. It may take less than ten years or over a century to dissolve depending on com-position and environment. For the first exhibition of these works three boulders were gathered—one flat, one vertical, one wedge shaped. Ann Barclay Morgan wrote, "... the action of “bleeding”...could be seen as the female life-force in the process of being released. The trans-formation into the deep colored limonite lends a sensuous quality to the marble.”

Dove Bradshaw

“The first use of water to effect change began in the early 1980s when I made silver-surfaced paintings chemically treated with liver of sulfur to react with humidity. In the early 1990s I used weather, combining unstable pyrite with marble to make my first shape-changing sculptures. Rain caused the iron pyrite to bleed and leave a permanent stain on the stone with the pyrite itself eventually breaking down and disappearing. In 1996, bringing “weather” inside, I made erosion works in salt and stone using water as the catalyst. A water-filled funnel calibrated for slowest flow was suspended above stone blocks, salt boulders, and mounds. The different densities of these materials gave the work its dynamic range. In Waterstone, from 1996, a pool of water became a fountain in slow motion leaving behind daily tide lines on a porous limestone block. The salt works, too, were indoor fountains with the use of natural materials and the slowness of action constituting a return to real time and real materials— a response to the art world’s overwhelming infatuation with shock value entertainment and virtual reality. There are four works in this series, each distinct in concept and in form, using salt in its three solid states: granules, crystals and boulders, to exhibit different reactions with water.

“The best of the serious art follows Buddhism's tenet of stripping away the extraneous ...And refreshing the conceptualism of the ubiquitous debris pile, Dove Bradshaw...has hung a slowly dripping glass funnel filled with water over a cone of Himalayan salt. An elegant visual balance and a concise metaphor for time, death, man versus nature, or just about anything else, it works as a kind of universal mantra.” Robert Shuster The Village Voice, New York, 2007

Dove Bradshaw - Contingency Paintings

Bradshaw began making what she calls Contingency works in 1984…Over the next few years they developed in several directions. The most basic form is silver-leafed paper or canvas onto which a substance called liver of sulfur is poured or brushed. Liver of sulfur is a 17th century term which is still used (the modern form is sulfurated potash)….When this agent is applied to silver, the surface becomes unstable, changing in various ways in response to ambient humidity, light and heat. In Contingency Paintings Bradshaw brushes the whole surface with liver of sulfur, in Contingency Pours she pours it and lets it spread and pool as gravity dictates. [The works since 2010 involve natural material such as branches, roots, thorns thrown onto the silvered surface without regard to composition. Then the chemical is painted along those lines.]* Upon contact the silver turns a brilliant gold, then gets turquoise hues in a pitted or streaked form, then deep blue, then a greenish color, and eventually an iridized black. The initial chemical reaction is most noticeable, but it keeps going at a slower rate thereafter, and never stops. The effect is indeterminate in the sense that the result is unpredictable and often surprising.

Tom Shannon’s paintings bustle with life — neon polymers suggest rampant vines, moist lips, and teeming coral reefs. But the multimedia artist generates these complex forms with a simple machine, a pendulum of his own design that swings over the canvas, releasing pigment from six radio-controlled paint guns. “The process is full of surprises,” the 62-year-old artist says. “The pendulum lets me step outside to observe nature as it produces layer after layer of detail.”

Shannon made his MoMA debut in 1969, at age 22, with a robot-philodendron cyborg that writhed when you stroked its leaves. In more recent years, he has wowed audiences with magnet-and-metal sculptures that hover in the air. As inspirations for his new work, which critic Raymond Foye described as making “the invisible forces of gravity and mass palpable and visible,” Shannon cites physicist (and pendulum builder) Léon Foucault, Dadaist Max Ernst, Renaissance master Fra Angelico, and the “indelible reference point of LSD.”

Keith Thyson, Nature Paintings, December 2005–Present Day

Mixed media on aluminium

The support surface for each Nature Painting is an acid-primed aluminium panel. Onto this a variety of paints, pigments and other substances are poured and allowed to interact in a number of specified ways. What the painting finally looks like is thus determined by several factors including the viscosity of the different fluids and their behaviour under gravitational pull, the way in which ambient and local temperature affects such things as rates of evaporation and chemical reaction, the miscibility or otherwise of the liquids involved, the quantities used, and the order in which they are applied. The outcome may resemble any one of the myriad things to be seen in nature, from a section of the Horse Head nebula to a histology plate, a rock formation or the scum around an industrial outflow. The title Nature Paintings, however, refers not to the subject matter of the works, but to the manner in which they were made. As Tyson points out, the significant aspect of the series is not that they are paintings of nature, but they are paintings by nature. As Tyson explains …

“The reason that these paintings resemble rock formations, cells, clouds or satellite images is simply because the same laws that created those phenomena also create the Nature Paintings. I think of them in terms of entropy; like very thin atmospheres with all the complex flow of a dynamic weather system that at a certain point is frozen. The results can be quite extraordinary but unrepeatable. I apply the pigments and chemicals but have very little control over the final outcome “

http://keithtyson.com/michael-archer-nature-paintings/