Allison Shockley

Encaustic Paintings: This Body of encaustic work draws it's inspiration from natural forms, the microcosm, and chaos theory. In the natural world, as well as in our lives, there is delicate balance between chaos and order. What at first appears to be random or chaotic is often a part of a larger repeating pattern or structure. Although this may elude our immediate consciousness, our eye is so used to pattern recognition in the world around us, that I believe we percieve what we see as somehow right when the perfect balance chaos and order is achieved. As I build up the layers of my paintings there is a continual push and pull between chaos and order. A painting is resolved when there are unpredictable and unique areas to keep the eye interested within a structured, harmonious whole.

Photography. Parallel World: This body of work was inspired by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's "On Growth and Form," an interdisciplinary masterpiece which applies mathematics and physics to the study of the form and stucture of living things. Upon reading the chapter "The Forms of cells" I was in awe of the fact that in perfect conditions a drop of ink falling through water will produce a form analagous to a jellyfish, an organism that is created and formed in water. Using Gouache, a tank of water, and a camera, I set out to capture the forms that are created as pigment falls through water. Through experimentation with various methods of introducing pigment into the water, I created the semblance of a jellyfish, of gray matter in the brain, of flowers and eel-like creatures that moved, changed, and eventually dissipated. Craving more complexity in the final images, I began to consider each photograph as a building block, much like the initial cell of an organism. Using photoshop I juxtaposed or replicated the "bulding blocks" creating more complex forms, which, through symmetry, brought new life to the images. The resulting body of work recalls an incredibly real but imaginary parallel universe where the distinction between environment, inanimate object, and living organism are blurred.