And, strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:
And suddenly one more impatient cried—
“Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

(Khayaam)

As a child, I had a fascination with space. The scale of the planets struck me with a profoundly palpable force. I believe that this was my first revelation that things were both not as they seem, and interconnected in unimaginable ways.
I remember an animation from my childhood : in it an electron appears on the screen, encompassing the visual field. The view zooms out to reveal that it is an electron that binds an atom of hydrogen, inside a cell, which divides to form a blade of grass, and then zooms out further to a park, then a city, a country, a continent, the Earth, and the planets and stars. As a child playing games of my own imagination, I would squeeze my eyes shut and feel the lens pulling upward from me – to reveal my house, my neighborhood, the city of Chicago, the North American continent, the earth, and outward still to the scale of the heavenly bodies. I’d then reverse the process inward, back to earth and finally inside my own body – through my skin, my organs, then into the microscopic scale of the molecules in me.
As an adult, my interest in space has become a fascination with physics and cosmology… and by extension some of the “big questions”. As someone for whom painting seems inevitable, these questions manifest themselves in the desire to pull form out of formlessness – to distill the relationship between the contained and the container.
I believe that there is an attraction between the logical and the aesthetic senses, and I don’t hold with Edmund Burke, who argued that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The presence of one gives way to the other. Beyond this, I believe that the subjectivity of the sublime actually belies a kind of personality – that it is actually an id-like force presupposing an ego. Contents and vessel are separate, but each relies on the other to know itself.
Of course, I cannot rightly separate myself from this equation. My paintings involve a desire to coerce the sublime into existence. I make a choice to impose chaos and indeterminism onto a work by deliberately loosening control in the underpainting, and then extrapolating form and a personal logic from the initial disordered, unformed state. My paintings are a negotiation between control and loss of control.
I impose pictorial problems by, for example, using oil and water-based media together, or by throwing loose graphite onto a still-wet work. Resolving these discordant moments requires cautious attention – addressing one problem often creates a new one. But it is the first embattled state of the work that opens a passage to other levels of meaning. This method exposes a telescopic and microscopic potential in a work, and unearths small clues toward the inextricable identities of the “potter” and the “pot”.

Camille Altay  2011