ELEVEN COMETS Eleven Comets is a mixed-media collage/painting created entirely on-site within the Nine Gallery. Scaling up my multilayered process of working on paper, I challenged myself to create a piece larger than I can accommodate in my studio, and faster: the entire 66-foot wide piece was created in 3 1/2 days.
At once referring to the realms of the evening sky and the deep sea, the work is this artist's impression of the invisible objects, energies, and forces teeming just beyond our powers of material detection. The comets, harbingers of change, at once plunge towards earth and hang in the heavens.
Eleven comets were recorded in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle written in the 9th-12th centuries. About the comet of 1066 the Chronicle says: "At that time throughout all England, a portent such as men had never seen before was seen in the heavens. Some declared that the star was a comet, which some call 'the long-haired star'.... and shone every night for a week."
In a lovely coincidence, Rosetta's Philae probe landed successfully on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko the week Eleven Comets opened.
Related publicity: Portland Mercury » (Scroll down to read) - 11/12/2015 (PDF)
