hydrospheres : parenchyma

‘the river is within us
 the sea all about us.’
(t.s.eliot – the dry salvages – faber & faber, 1941)

pond (sandgate, kent 2008)

hydroform #3 - colony (photogram, sandgate, 1990)

details

project: hydrospheres (from water to land in a single life)
imaging: macro-photography & photo-microscopy
location: pond and studio, sandgate, kent
date: spring 2008
outcome: giclee print series

journal:
in 1926 vladimir vernadsky proclaimed that living matter was ‘animated water’.
during 1994 McMenamin and McMenamin delivered a new and comprehensive view of life on land. the ‘hypersea hypothesis’ was a greatly expanded understanding of vernadsky’s viewpoint. hypersea is the interior ocean, the vast network of interconnecting watercourses that is held inside the
 terrestrial biomass. for the land to be populated, life had to rise up and out of the sea. to achieve this it had to take the sea with it.

the great biodiversity of land-borne life has evolved countless ways to internally conserve water in what is a naturally desiccating environment. each living being a vessel that must successfully carry our inner fluid throughout the earth’s atmosphere.

all terrestrial life (bar certain bacteria) can be seen as a symbiotic matrix of liquid systems that ebb and flow across the planet’s surface, an interactive unity, a collective cellular watery grouping of all land based biota.
 hypersea is a rich scientific theory that powerfully enhances our current understanding of nature’s processes and more importantly the level of connectivity that we as humans have with the ecosystem as a whole.

reference
margulis, lynn – the symbiotic planet –  weidenfield & nicolson, 1998
mcmenamin mark and mcmenamin, dianna – hypersea, columbia university press, 1994
vernadsky, vladimir – the biosphere – copernicus, 1998 (english edition)

hydrosphere #3 (waveform)

parenchyma

project: parenchyma
commission
: saga middleburg building
date: 2008
format: 645 transparency
substrate: aluminum plate
production: sandgate studio, kent

previous series: tomato et al
format: 35mm transparency
prints: 20 images on metal plate
exhibited: the metropole galleries, folkestone, kent
date: 2003

journal:
robert hooke (1635-1703) named cells ‘little rooms’
rudolf von virchow (1821 – 1902) in 1858 stated that ‘all cells come from cells’

etymology: parenchyma – gr. parenkhuma – something poured in beside. para beside, plus- enkhuma infusion. cell – lat. cella – chamber.
biological definition: thin walled vacuolated cells. (bubble like compartments, vacuoles or fluid containing sacs, that hold cell-sap).

modern day cell theory:
all living things are composed of cells and cells only arise from other cells
there is a stage in all multi-cellular organisms when they are just a single cell
there is no known spontaneous generation under current conditions
cells can be viewed as self instructing chemical factories

saga install (print on metal plate, middleburg building, 2008)

parenchyma #7

parenchyma #8