Beginning

Everything here comes out of a single point, just right of centre and slightly high. Lines radiate from it in white, red, yellow and green, and near the middle they pack so tightly that the black card underneath almost disappears — the colours sit edge to edge and start reading as one bright mass rather than as separate marks.

Move outward and it loosens. The radiating lines spread apart, black opens up between them, and other lines start cutting across the whole thing at their own angles: long diagonals, a couple of dark greens running almost the full height, a white one travelling right across the lower half. None of those obey the centre. They’re what stops it settling into a neat starburst and keeps a proper unpredictability in it.

It reminded me of matter bursting outward — what I picture when I think about the start of a universe. Not objects, because nothing has size or dimension yet, only direction and difference. Lines are about as close as I can get to that: they occupy no real area, they just have a heading, and the colour is doing all the work of telling one from another when there’s nothing else to go on. Black behind it helps, because the colours have to hold themselves up rather than sit on anything.

The rule was simple enough. Lines from a point, four colours, and permission to break the pattern when it needed breaking. After the first few hundred it stopped being possible to say where it was going. Small differences in where each line lands compound into something nobody could work out in advance, least of all me — fully determined by the process and completely unpredictable from it. That’s the property I keep chasing across this series.

Which is why it earns the title. The whole thing is contained in that one point, and none of it can be read off from it.