‘This project started as an exploration of analogue mark-making that created a vocabulary, a voice, to reveal the finished product - a mixed media multi-layered, compartmentalised lightbox. Organic Digital combines six individually created light-boxes in one connected frame that explores mark-making through the abstraction of ink, water, light and shadow. The journey to collect a set of visual algorithms and create a grammar that identifies similarities in the qualities of ink, organic material and how digitisation both adds and takes away from the final product, involved two phases of experimentation and refinement of the process used to construct the final iteration of the work.  

The rationale for using the materials and process I have can be seen in the resulting work. The light-boxes are made up of abstractions of ink, water, organic matter, light and shadow that are used as mark-making mediums, reduced in quality, and where the exact context is changed by the presentation of the material in this format. 

The work’s qualities can be seen in both the individual collections within the light-boxes and the overall work. The use of digital to capture sound and light gives the work an ethereal quality that is open to interpretation. It does indeed celebrate the expressive warmth of communicating, capturing and sharing through the traditional mark-making process. It uses the diverse media to deliver an abstracted personal reflection on how are we changing sharing, capturing and communicating by sanitising through the digital process.

Key findings from this work are that abstraction and reinterpretation through digital processes both enhance and detract from traditional more organic means of the mark-making. The process looks it was taken with less confidence and less control that of someone purposely replicating and storing an image for sharing or communicating or other purpose. It blurs the outcome with an inference or an impression rather than a solid, strong representations. 

I would further explore this work by enlarging it and adding more boxes. Separating them into individuals and clusters. It also lends itself to more specialised technology - such as a specific screen with on-board storage to make the frames lighter and less dependent on mains power. Digital Organic would also benefit from being shown in a less well-lit and more peaceful location such as a media gallery.