This piece, like so much of my work, is a collage of process.

Here is the juxtaposition of three processes in Curious Messenger.

Dyed Cherry Panel

Encaustic infused Linen

Pure pigment floating in a deep encaustic layer

I was thinking of the work of a number of very cool other artists in making Curious Messenger

Lindsay Seers’ I Was A Camera, (Now I Am A Projector) describes her early life as a camera and how she has now transformed into a projector.

I was thinking of the work of a number of very cool other artists in making Curious Messenger

Katie Patterson’s EarthMoonEarth translates Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code, and then transmits the signals to be bounced off the moon and back again to play on an in-gallery piano.

I was thinking of the work of a number of very cool other artists in making Curious Messenger

The movie Avatar

I was thinking of the work of a number of very cool other artists in making Curious Messenger

And that famous picture of earth from the moon taken by NASA in 1969

There are currently (2013) two unmanned spacecraft sending and receiving ongoing updates from Earth.

They are mission specific machines sent to closely examine Mars (Curiosity) and Mercury (Messenger).

In the past, humans have sent unmanned craft called names like Voyageur, Viking and Explorer on trajectories that head out from their origins on earth and then on ever-outward into the void.

Curiosity and Messenger, however, are singularly aimed at one destination and are singularly purposed as avatars for human sensory experience.

Curiosity will die and sadly yes, the Messenger will be killed by the harsh environments of their destinations.

They act, however, not as ambassadors, not as fly-by tourists, and not as questing explorers with important identities of their own.

They act as equally important extensions of the human consciousness.

Even the nature of their names has changed from that of individual agents to that of aligned componentry of the human project.

They act, not as cameras taking snapshots and postcards to send home, but as projectors sending human directed investigative activity out to these two planets.

When we send and receive our coded messages to and from these avatars, will the vicarious experience that we gain from them be something like that roughly translated Morse code Moonlight Sonata?

So much for the Why? - what about the how?

The cherry wood panel was coloured with aniline dyes, and the splattered with water before the dye set. A final coat of finish wax seals the wood surface.
The heavily layered encaustic paint (beeswax, damar resin and microcrystalline-wax combined with pigment powders) applied directly to the wood.
Encaustic medium is soaked through the Linen and into the wood beneath effectively binding them together.

This is Curious Messenger in its first iteration.

It was permanently altered in 2014, after the fuss and hurry of the art school grad show was over.