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Stardust: Bone & Botticelli My micrographs of bone have been a touchstone of evolving perceptions for me over the years. One day I ‘inverted’ these images, reversing light to dark, dark to light, and saw this same view of bone and blood cells in a new way, illuminated, mysteriously sublime, as though revealing their essential nature, and this has stayed with me. Today, among extraordinary insights about the cosmos from the Webb Space Telescope, is the reminder that we too are made of the same “star stuff”, Carl Sagan’s assertion that the calcium in our bones and iron in our blood were forged in the explosion of a dying star billions of years ago. I had never considered the connection between the cosmos and my own body in this way. As I ponder the stardust in my bones and the cosmos within everything, Stardust: Bone & Botticelli explores variations on a theme of dust, in a series of micrographs which include my bone, detritus from the backside of a Botticelli painting on wood, and contemplations on the ubiquitous dust of our own realm in the ways we experience it - its fusions and manifestations, existential and metaphoric: material decay and holding the essence of the cosmos. In this work I look at the way perception and meaning are intertwined, as I invert my micrographs, exploring the interchangeability of form and space, darkness and light, negative and positive. Zoomed in thousands of times, a blood cell evokes a celestial body; crumbs of wax, dirt, and grime evoke a landscape. Everything of the cosmos is connected, from a speck of dust to a planet, a neuron to a galaxy. "Beings and aeons are as many as dust particles, and all are present in every particle of dust."
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STARDUST: BONE & BOTTICELLI
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