"Cyclical" explores Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence/eternal return. Nietzsche believed that all events in cosmic history have repeated, and will continue to repeat, in an endless cycle. Imagine time moving on the outline of a flat circle; everything we have done or will do as individuals we will do again and again - infinitely repeating, lifetime after lifetime.
In this series I experiment with the idea of eternal recurrence through forced visual repetition. I overlap sections of a photograph in a mirror-like style and then digitally manipulate them to blend seamlessly into the natural background. The limb of a tree is mirrored and then blended to match the opposite foliage. This is in an attempt to compress the time-based theory of eternal recurrence into a series of two-dimensional representations.
I have chosen the natural landscape of Residency 108 to represent the photographic base of my eternal return interpretation. Nature is pure in existence, wild in form, and seemingly random in occurrence, yet the theme of repetition within the theory still applies. The finished editing does not immediately stand out, but rather is discovered through the mind’s habitual recognition of subtle patterns, symmetry, and visual discrepancies.
