Chaos Waves

This one came out of the sketchbook — red and black fine-liner, the two colours I settled on at the start and then stayed with. That was more or less the only decision made in advance. Everything after it happened in the making, over the course of the piece.

The lines end up behaving like waves because that’s what lines do when you repeat them and let them cross. Sound moving through air, light coming off water, the interference you get where two sets of ripples meet. I didn’t set out to illustrate any of that, but it’s in there, and I’ve stopped being surprised by it. A lot of this work over the years has ended up looking like something from nature, and I think that’s because nature is where you most often see the thing I’m actually interested in: a very simple starting point, repeated, arriving somewhere far more complicated than it had any right to.

That’s the whole idea underneath it. Set one small rule going and keep to it, and you can’t work out from the rule itself what you’re going to get. The restriction isn’t a limitation — it’s what makes the piece possible. Two colours and one repeated gesture turn out to be enough. The same thing happens in games and in the patterns mathematicians find by running a formula over and over: something emerges that looks designed, and wasn’t. It was just allowed to happen.

Which is why the finished piece feels less like something I invented than something I turned up.