...strangely looping strangely looooo...

it’s been a while since ive found the space to write something sufficiently mycelial here. time shrinks and enlarges again. this week i find myself nestled inside an artistic residency in the portuguese countryside, sheltering me from airplanes, capital letters and day jobs. i am here making and constructing a 20 metre long paper drawing into a looped form, inspired by the concept of a strange loop in timothy mortons dark ecology.

originally stemming from the urge to connect with a trace of a place - through image, and the marking of a moment - i found myself ironing images with wax, a kind of primitive alchemy that releases the ink to make rubbings. i was in a period of loss, the image becoming porous, unfixed. since its initiation in 2021, the work continues to loop through many iterations, its site responsiveness allows it to travel, grow and adapt itself to a place.

so here i am at osso collective, and i’m using this 1970’s petrochemical ink to trace real objects, and realising that i should be wearing a mask, and laughing at it all because its so fitting with timothy mortons text - and i mean laughing in a bittersweet way.

in dark ecology, the loop as an aesthetic experience functions to disrupt the boundary between subject and object, reflecting the looping causality of ecological systems. these aesthetic loops don’t offer clean narratives or moral resolution. instead they mirror the ecological reality of being stuck in a system we cannot step outside of — asking us not to dominate, resolve, or escape, but to coexist inside the strangeness.

these looping aesthetics undo the idea of control or mastery. like trying to make a drawing with an iron, there is both a clumsiness and a weird precision required to get an interesting result.

like encountering things that are neither fully object nor fully background - the petrochemical ink becomes the leaf, the flower, or the root, and the leaves become collaborators in the drawing. the result is looping time - the images printed in the 1970s produce material for the present moment. the images i remove with my iron are very likely to be landscapes already destroyed in real time.

mortons loop swallows endings and beginnings. there is no tidy arc of exploration and discovery leading to better times, like the pages of the magazine.

the image of the ouroboros appears thoughout the book - a snake swallowing his own tale. i discovered, on my first day walking here, a freshly shed snake skin intact in the grass. it turns out it works rather well as an indexical drawing. but it also helped me to shape my paper work into a mobius strip (a surface that contains a twist, meaning that if you follow the surface, you always come back to where you started from).

the ouroboros, in mortons view, is not a symbol of cosmic harmony, but a representation of a twisted coexistance with strangeness.

it feels like this could be an endless text, a little like the days pass in the countryside without the interruptions of the city. im resisting the need to wrap up the loop.

drawing a connection to mycelium, once again, i find it interesting to note the parallels. mycelium is not the foundation of morton's philosophy, but it is an almost perfect biological image of several core themes: distributed interdependence, strange intimacy, hidden entanglement, and the collapse of neat boundaries between self and world. despite the fact that i feel massively far from the hustle, i’m aware that this is an illusion, and tomorrow i will leave this place with my loop and my snakeskin rolled up in my bag. to be continued..