Efficacy

Efficacy begins with a question about what a form is for. Stalks rise in close ranks across a pale ground, each one crowned by a disc of concentric rings — an eye, a seed head, a cross-section through something that has been growing a long while. The surface is worked in fine stipple, thousands of small marks describing cellular tissue without ever settling into a single organism. What reads at a distance as a garden resolves, close up, into diagram: structures set down as though someone were trying to establish, patiently and without sentiment, exactly what each part does.

The Strange Efficacy holds a dozen of these forms in one square, their colours running from deep teal and indigo through ochre and vermilion to a bruised violet. Nothing is symmetrical and nothing looks accidental; the discs sit at slightly different heights, like instruments giving slightly different readings. Each piece is offered as a limited-edition giclée print on museum-quality cotton paper — an abstract work with the density of a specimen plate, and the patience of one.