Glossary of Terms

Not definitions, but coordinates

INTERSENTIENT STATES

Awareness arising between observer and form.

A term describing perceptual conditions in which awareness appears distributed across the encounter between object and observer.

The concept does not propose consciousness within objects. Rather, it refers to moments in which distinctions between subject and object become less fixed, allowing attention to circulate between viewer, form, memory, and perception.

Intersentient States emerge through sustained looking. They are neither symbolic messages nor narratives awaiting interpretation. Instead they describe conditions of heightened attentiveness in which meaning remains open and unresolved.

Forms may appear familiar, human, architectural, or archaic, yet remain resistant to final categorisation. What matters is not what the work represents, but how it organises perception.

THE ATTENTIONAL INTERVAL

The pause in which attention circulates.

The Attentional Interval describes a moment of perceptual suspension between observer and form.

It is not a physical space alone, but a condition in which attention circulates rather than settles. Within this interval, recognition remains incomplete and perception becomes unusually active.

The concept emerged through studio practice but is not medium-specific. Similar conditions may arise in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and other cultural forms.

The Attentional Interval provides one of the principal conditions through which Intersentient States become possible.

OSCILATORY ATTENTION

Attention circling between observer and form.

A term describing the repeated movement of perception between observer and form.

Rather than settling into immediate recognition, attention returns again and again to the work, moving between what is seen, remembered, anticipated, and inferred. The object appears alternately familiar and unfamiliar, resolved and unresolved. Each act of looking modifies the next.

This oscillatory movement helps sustain the Attentional Interval by delaying closure and resisting definitive interpretation. Meaning remains provisional. Perception continues to circulate.

The process is often subtle and may occur without conscious awareness. It is experienced not as uncertainty alone, but as a productive state in which the work remains active within perception. Looking becomes a form of continual nearing rather than arrival.

Oscillatory Attention contributes to the emergence of Intersentient States and to the condition described elsewhere as the Sisyphean Horizon: a horizon approached through repeated acts of attention, yet never fully reached.

THE SISYPHEAN HORIZON

Approaching resolution without arrival.

The Sisyphean Horizon describes a condition of perpetual approximation. Forms move toward resolution without fully arriving. Each adjustment reveals further complexity. Completion remains visible yet unreachable.

The term draws upon the figure of Sisyphus, not as a symbol of futility but as an image of continual engagement. The horizon remains distant precisely because the work continues to develop.

Rather than representing failure, the Sisyphean Horizon describes a productive condition in which uncertainty remains active and enquiry remains alive.

RELIQUARY FORMS

Not containers of belief, but vessels for possibility.

These works echo the stillness and gravity of devotional objects without belonging to any particular tradition. They function less as repositories than as sites of projection, reflection, and pause.

What they contain remains deliberately uncertain. Their significance lies not in what is held, but in what remains withheld.

VESSELES, FIGURES, TABLEAUX

Three related modes of enquiry.

The vessel explores volume, containment, proportion, and spatial presence.

The figure investigates posture, orientation, and embodied encounter.

The tableau explores surface, image, inscription, and pictorial space.

Although distinct, these categories continually inform one another. Ideas migrate between them, generating a practice in which boundaries remain intentionally permeable.

DISTILLED ATTENTION

A studio term describing the gradual reduction of form toward necessity.

It does not imply minimalism, but concentration. Decisions emerge through repetition, hesitation, adjustment, and return.

Distilled Attention refers to a process in which complexity is not eliminated but compressed, allowing forms to operate with greater clarity and intensity.

Suspended Geometries

Forms that hold balance without closure.

Such works occupy a condition between order and instability, structure and dissolution. Their force derives not from completion but from the tension of what remains unresolved.

Suspended Geometries are less concerned with equilibrium than with the maintenance of active uncertainty.

RESONANT GROUPINGS

Configurations in which relationships between forms become part of the work itself.

Meaning emerges not only through individual objects but through their spatial arrangement and proximity. Distances, alignments, interruptions, and echoes contribute to the overall perceptual experience.

The artist sometimes describes these arrangements as choral juxtapositions — multiple forms held in a shared field while retaining their individual identity.

CHORAL JUXTAPOSITIONS

Groups of objects whose relationships generate meanings unavailable to any single work alone.

The term borrows from music, where independent voices combine to produce larger structures of resonance.

Choral Juxtapositions are not narrative arrangements. They function through rhythm, spacing, proportion, repetition, and difference.

CHIRAL JUXTAPOSITIONS

A term adapted from chemistry, where chirality describes forms that resemble one another without becoming identical.

Within the studio, it refers to pairings or groupings that appear related yet resist symmetry. Similarities remain evident, but exact correspondence is withheld.

The resulting condition is one of proximity without equivalence — a balance between likeness and difference.