In this work, the image is not constructed through composition, nor resolved through the decisions of the eye. It arises from the direct interaction of forces within a controlled system. Frequency, liquid, light and duration are brought into relation. What follows is not representation, but the visible registration of that interaction.

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0162, 2026
Analogue photograph
Unique work

Cymatics provides a point of entry, but not a subject.

When Ernst Chladni first demonstrated that vibration could organise matter into visible form, he established a principle rather than an image. Hans Jenny extended this into complex material systems, showing that frequency does not describe form. It produces it. These experiments are often treated as illustrations. Here, they are understood as operating conditions.

Ernst Chladni, sand-plate vibration figure, c.1800
Image: Public domain. Ernst Chladni

I do not depict cymatic phenomena.

I construct the conditions under which they occur.

A liquid surface is set into vibration at specific frequencies. Energy passes through the medium, generating regions of compression and rarefaction. At certain thresholds, resonance is achieved. The system stabilises momentarily into coherent geometries: standing waves, nodal fields, distributed lattices of force. These structures are not imposed. They are the system resolving itself.

Faraday Standing Wave, Plate 0152, from Cymatic Water + Light
Analogue photograph
Unique work

The photograph is made at that point.

What is recorded is not a pattern.
It is the behaviour of energy made visible in matter.

This position extends a methodology developed over four decades. In earlier works, light is forced through an unstable liquid plane, where surface tension acts as a lens, reorganising illumination into caustic structure before it reaches the subject. In the cymatic works, the same medium is activated differently. The structuring force is no longer light passing through the surface, but frequency operating within it.

Grace, from the series Vanitas, 2010
Analogue photograph
Editioned work

The mechanism is constant. The excitation differs.

In Grace, light is the force acting through the surface. In Cymatic Water + Light, frequency is the force acting within it.

In both cases, the image is not composed. It is the result of energy encountering resistance, passing through instability, and resolving into form. The photograph marks the moment at which that resolution becomes visible. After that moment, the system disperses. The configuration cannot be recovered.

The image is therefore not an interpretation. It is the fixed trace of an event.

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0166
Analogue photograph
Unique work

This distinction is structural. It separates the work from traditions in which the image is built through accumulation, revision or manipulation. Here, no element is added after the fact. There is no second system. The behaviour recorded in the exposure contains the totality of the event. Any subsequent intervention would replace that behaviour with an approximation that does not share its conditions.

Resonance does not describe the world.
It operates within it.

At a certain scale, these liquid structures suggest correspondences beyond the immediate system. Contemporary physics has shown that space itself is not static, but subject to oscillation. Gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein and first directly observed a century later, describe a universe in which matter and energy continuously deform the fabric of space-time. These phenomena cannot be imaged directly. They are detected through their effects.

Gravitational wave visualisation, LIGO Scientific Collaboration
Image courtesy LIGO Scientific Collaboration

The cymatic field offers a parallel, not as metaphor, but as behaviour.

A vibrating liquid surface produces a multidimensional field of interaction, where waves intersect, interfere and stabilise into transient order. The resulting structures are neither random nor designed. They are the consequence of forces negotiating equilibrium within constraint. What becomes visible is not the wave itself, but the trace of its passage through matter.

The same is true at every scale.

What appears as pattern is the residue of interaction.
What appears as image is the record of that residue.

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0825
Analogue photograph
Unique work

The painterly quality often attributed to these works is not derived from reference to painting, but from the way a moving surface redistributes energy across a field. The resemblance to gesture or mark is incidental. It is generated by the behaviour of the system, not by an intention to emulate it.

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (726), 1990, oil on canvas
Image courtesy Tate

There is no motif here.
Only conditions.

Across all works, the variables remain consistent: a contained body of water, a controlled input of energy, a defined temporal window, and a camera positioned to register what the system produces. The outcome cannot be predicted in detail. It can only be prepared for. The role of the artist is not to determine the image, but to construct a system capable of producing one.

In this sense, authorship resides in the conditions, not the result.

The photograph does not conclude the process. It marks the point at which the process becomes visible. Once that point has passed, the system collapses. The water stills. The energy dissipates. Nothing within the configuration survives.

Cymatic Water + Light, Plate 0182
Analogue photograph
Unique work

What remains is the photograph.

Not as representation.
Not as interpretation.
But as evidence that something occurred.

Resonance is not an effect applied to the image.

It is the condition under which the image is permitted to exist.