Manifold

First exhibited -Horizon

Feb/March 2012

Manifold is a series of thirteen drawings made using ink, watercolour, pencil, and Copic marker. Each work adopts the distinctive format of the Hubble Space Telescope’s field of view, a stepped shape that arose due to the differing resolutions of Hubble’s four onboard cameras. To unify their outputs into a single composite image, one of the cameras had to be optically constricted, resulting in the now-iconic form. This shape became widely recognised through one of Hubble’s most celebrated images, the 1995 photograph of the Pillars of Creation - a dense region of gas and dust where stars and galaxies are born.

The Manifold drawings traverse multiple visual registers, blending interpretations of satellite imagery, cellular structures, and deep space. By working within the compositional logic of the Hubble field, I engage with the limits and capabilities of our imaging technologies—tools that make visible both the vast reaches of the cosmos and the intricacies of life at microscopic scales.

The series continues my ongoing interest in the relationship between the very large and the very small, and in how scientific instruments shape our perception of reality. The title Manifold refers not only to multiplicity and layered complexity, but also to the mathematical concept of a manifold as a structure that locally resembles Euclidean space, another nod to the conceptual terrain of measurement, mapping, and the elusive fabric of space-time.