Metamorphosis
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Brenda May Gallery, Waterloo, Sydney NSW, Australia - May/June 2012
The tube-polyp colours of blue / green / yellow / red / orange link the pieces to the five classical elements common to philosophical-theological and early scientific theories. From the ancient Babylonian and classical Greek civilisations, through Japanese Buddhism, Tibetan Bön philosophy, Medieval alchemy, Renaissance natural philosophy and even to the early Enlightenment:- Water / blue – a metaphor for the fluid, formless, flowing things of the world Earth / green – hard, solid, resistant things Wind or Air / yellow – of things that grow, expand and enjoy freedom of movement Fire / red – of energetic, forceful things Void, Space or the æther / orange – which fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere: i.e. those things beyond our everyday experience. Intriguingly, the link between the five classical elements and science continues to this day. In contemporary physics, earth, water, wind, fire, and the æther, are analogous to the five states of nature – solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and what's known as the Bose-Einstein condensate, a physical form of matter composed of bosons which exists when gas atoms cool to temperatures very near absolute zero (minus 273 degrees Celsius), as in Space between the stars. The Bose-Einstein condensate is as hard to comprehend as Plato's æther was when he proposed it in the fourth century BC. |
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