Biodes
Remy Dean
Remy Dean on ‘Biodes’
Don’t they look tasty?
Perhaps because they are a visual ode to the ongoing bio-logical energy cycles of growth and digestion. Life ensures their continuity ensuring life continuing, in producer-consumer symbiosis… This could be considered a document of Process Art.
Although the compositions are lens-based transcripts, quite literally, there is also emphasis upon ambiguity and metaphor that mimic some conventions of poetic structure. An extension of the concepts I also explore in a series known as Land Poems, which are digital prints made with a similar photoreactive process using colours sampled from landscape. This time zooming-in on the minutiae, lifting colours and ratios from biological materials, including foodstuffs, that the land has gifted to us.
A subtle line, column, and grid structure maintains resonance with the rhythms of post-literate poetry whilst highlighting the importance of cross-overs, combinations, dialogues, and indistinct intersections. With Biodes, there seems to be a tendency toward greater asymmetry — a common trait that causes happiness and satisfaction. Just like the right sequence of well-matched starter, mains, and dessert.
Compositional choices are guided by the interaction of lines, defined by colour, and inspired by rhythmic and metric patterns of poetry. They can be read in multiple directions starting from any point within the implied grid. Each time the eye explores, it need not start at the same location, and may find a different resting point. Subtle shades, the hues of flavour, will offer satisfaction through a variety of sequences and combinations. Don’t chefs say the first taste is with the eye?
As with elements formally arranged on a canvas, matching a variety of flavours, textures, and colours, for our dinner plates, or bento, contributes to joy and health. Bland foods bore us and we seek interesting and sometimes surprising combinations. Sweet, sour, salt, umami, and spice — very different flavours can all work together to create nutritious harmony. Five flavour groups suggesting a word that has five letters and usually appears only as part of bigger words…
The source materials — proteins, nuts, berries, fruits, vegetables — were selected and prepared following the advice of medics and health practitioners. Ingredients were bullet-blended down to release their optimum nutrition whilst also revealing the vibrancy of their hidden colours and their homogenised textures. These were then combined in beneficial ratios and the colours sampled using macro-photography. The revealed pigments and visual tones provide a visual vocabulary from which the compositions were written.
The organic materials themselves grew from the land, springing from elements in soil and air. So, in some respects, Biodes are a form of landscape photography and resonate with Land Poems in a dialogue of scale. In these photoreal abstractions, reminiscent of spectrographs or DNA sequencing, literal referencing is obscured by the often overlooked details.
Originally intended for a gallery show, postponed due to pandemic, I have since explored other methods of display. In collaboration with The Signifier team, I hope to present these poems on vessels, such as mugs [now available here]. This will encourage the reading of them in a sequence because, if reproduced on a curved surface, the whole image would not be visible all at once.
Perhaps such a disseminated mode is more accessible? Is the image sublimated onto an everyday object, in the hand, more inviting than framed against a white wall, at arm’s length? The gallery will be the kitchen shelf, the breakfast bar, dining room, desk, and patio table. A functional vessel seems well-suited to the consumable nature of the inspiration and in tune with those ongoing biological energy cycles of growth and digestion.
We shall savour and celebrate the process we are a part of.
Remy Dean
