03/07/2025
Picking up where we left off in Part 1/3
Part 2
The decision to leave the Moon Pond, tucked away with friends near central Glasgow, did not come easy or all at once.
A long, drawn out game of cat and mouse - the mouse being my eternal striving for artistic perfection, the cat being reality, and rent.
A giant 2 bedroom flat, which took a good 40 seconds to walk across it at full speed, was actually way too much for me, despite my eccentricities.
The previous October, my best friend and roommate Owain was to depart and live with his lovely partner.
I think that was the first sign I had departed from reason, the inability to make moves to find another pal to share the flat.
Although, I was painting in top form then, pumping put acrylic canvases with figurative accuracy I had only dreamed of.
The tunnel was opening up for me, goading me to enter its warm and timeless loop of the artistic spirit.
I think everyone has seen the entrance to this tunnel, and I’ve come to learn a good artist is one who moves through the tunnel without getting stuck.
Hyperfocus allows the mind to hold within it many factors and elements that contribute to a higher goal, so it’s necessary at certain points.
Perhaps the lack of consistent company, mixed with newfound techniques and methods to explore, gave my mind enough reason to sacrifice stability for solitude.
And solitude it was .. with a stocked fridge and enough lekky for a week, I could forget the outside world for days, interupted only by nosey friends wanting an update on the work.
One evening during that period, something extremely peculiar happened, something that I can’t entirely explain.
I was trying to capture an image of an iridescent moon crystal which was originally apart of one of those crystal sun scatter mobiles.
I thought I may be able to get a vectorized 3d version of the shape , use it as a brand tool, but at the very least, I could use the raw image on my website.
Peering through my phone camera, the screen showed shapes of light that didn’t make sense to me - physically, it felt alive and weird. I couldn’t really see it with raw eyes, but when I moved the phone closer to the crystal, there it was, an entire internal light world, fully apprehensible by the small aperture, but not easily appreciated with ordinary sight.
Taking a moment of silence, I surmised that the diffused light in the corner of my room must be the source of the feral technicolor dreamscape.
What followed was one of the strangest evenings I’ve had - With absolutely zero thoughts, I automatically moved swiftly to create a film set, one where I could manipulate the light, move the crystals with my hands, and keep the camera on a stand, steady and focused..
Mind you, I had no idea why or what I was doing, but I moved with a purpose that I still don’t recognise.
When the setup finally fell into place, capturing the first footage was transformational for me - I had never witnessed this kind of imagery, and to have such precise control, I could take it any direction.
I found you could add textures into the mix by placing them close by, angling the crystals reflective sides and catching the bits you like.
I memorized hand positions to bring about certain narratives, but then also found that with a lot of mirrors surrounding the crystals, the textures image bounced around enough that aiming the crystals was no longer necessary, the textures were everywhere now!
This was all discovered in a single fateful night, with consecutive days after devoted to constructing a kaleidoscope you can sit in.
I think that was the first physical incarnation of the Moon Pond, but Moon Ponds exist all over the place.
The definition of a Moon Pond is:
noun; A place where the boundaries of perspective are made visible.
Part 2 of 3
