"Rorschach Blot, Ascending"
This arresting image plays upon the potential tension between denotation and connotation in visual meaning. The roots of an extraordinary tree stump, long submerged in a local lake, take flight here as a Rorschach ink blot that invites the viewer, first, to interpret its psychological content - that is, to decide what this dark thing "looks like" to them - and then to disconfirm and discredit their own connotative interpretation... since, upon further inspection, this phantasm is, in reality, nothing more than an upside-down image of a tree stump in a lake. Still, both meanings in their alternate realities - menacing ink blot, benign tree stump - somehow persist side-by-side in the mind, and make this picture harder to breeze past and forget.
TITLE - "Rorschach Blot, Ascending"
WHERE - Sasamat Lake, Port Moody, B.C. (2015)