Liu Kincheloe

I relate ornament to an esoteric capacity referencing alchemical literature that often assigns families of correspondence, association, and meaning to familiar forms and natural elements. Making patterns feels like a devotional experience to me—the geometries that emerge in kaleidoscope reflection seem to have an elemental signature and reflect elemental characters. Local form, its placement, color, and numerical weight take on symbolic consideration—as works aspire to be functional sigils or talismans. Inter-relationship of form within pattern is special because adjacent forms co-create each other—positive form and negative space become interchangeable in daisy chain. In this way, a symmetrical pattern is a device to denote transcendence, and painting these designs is an act of embodying that relationship.

The structural bones of the paintings often start with a reflected motif that is unfolded in mirror symmetry—where new, unplanned forms appear in the axis of reflection. Symmetry expands the energy of that original motif or selection, and makes it readable, like a tarot card, and new forms are found and culled in this process. Wave patterns in nature have an obvious sense pattern derived from the system that created it, but each actual interval is actually irregular and difficult to mathematically determine and formulize. Similarly, I'm interested in a complicated and dense visual field with a sense of internal organization without the potential oppressiveness or implacability of rigid pattern, and so allows the pattern to give way to a sense organic movement or a sense of state change, animation, transformation, and liminality and space for the viewers to enter and relate. Ideally, the paintings have many visual pathways, like a body system and carry a sense of circulation, breath, meridians.