Conversations on the plurality of worlds
2021
Statement
Surveying the night sky, a charming philosopher and his hostess, the Marquise, consider the possibility of travelers from the moon. “What if they were skillful enough to navigate on the outer surface of our air, and from there, through their curiosity to see us, they angled for us like fish? Would that please you?” asks the philosopher. “Why not?” the Marquise replies. “As for me, I’d put myself into their nets of my own volition just to have the pleasure of seeing those who caught me.” —Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, translated by H.A. Hargreaves.
“If there are vast numbers of other universes, perhaps an infinite number, all with different properties, the odds are that at least one of them will have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things.” —Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End (2014)
This series of works consists of hand-cut paper sculptures that open up new imaginative territories and reimagine maps as fragile timepieces bearing traces of the shifting borders of human history, geology, and climate.
The work draws from contemporary scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s ideas on the multiverse and literary classics such as H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Jules Verne’s Around the Moon.
The title of the body of work is taken from Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686). Fontenelle’s classic text invited women into scientific speculation at a time when such discourse was overwhelmingly male. In Conversations, a philosopher and a Marquise wander beneath the night sky, musing on the possibility of life beyond Earth and on humanity’s modest place in an infinite cosmos.
Parallel to Fontenelle’s unraveling of the universe through conversation, I dissect and recompose cartographic surfaces, turning the authority of maps into delicate constellations of paper and shadow. Borders, once rigid, are set adrift in spirals, orbits, and organic patterns that echo planetary motion and geological change.
My sculptures suggest that our maps and the worlds they claim to contain are not fixed but living, mutable, and always subject to cosmic forces far greater than ourselves.