Alchemical Feathers

Alchemical Feathers

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In the process of making inks I perform many tests.  One of these involves pouring the ink across  a piece of paper to see how it flows, the rate at which pigments precipitate, and the relative viscosities of binders and other ingredients.  I write various observations on these experiments and pin them to a wall for reference.  One day I looked at this wall of notes and, to my delight, realized that the poured forms of these tests looked like feathers.  I had unwittingly forged a delightful statement regarding the imagination.  The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard noted that “the dynamic imagination puts seemingly unrelated objects into the same motion.”  On this wall I had given stones—the motionless denizens of the earth—the agency of weightlessness and flight.  The earth, in the form of feathers, was being given back to the sky.

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