There is a poem by John Keats that charges Sir Isaac Newton with destroying the poetry of the rainbow by "reducing it to a prism".
It is a prevalent perception that art and science are at odds.
I came across this text about the time I started putting these pictures together and the discord resonated with me on a personal level.
Often I would take my young daughter to this park on Lake Ontario and we would skip stones and chat. One afternoon, after a rainfall, we saw a full rainbow on the horizon and she began asking me about it. Now, I don't claim to know everything about light refraction and the photoreceptor outputs in our brains that cause the gradient hues to look like bands of colour, and even if I did I surely wouldn't throw that in the face of a 5 year old. In reality she was just wondering if we could get a closer look, stand in what must be it's spectacular warmth and light, or maybe slide over its arc, you know, like the Care Bears do.
This body of work situates itself on that misty shoreline somewhere between science and art.
Newton did explain the rainbow, and that bit of science led to spectroscopy, which is how we know what stars are made of. This was also a clue to learning about an expanding universe and how big it is and how it all actually began. The point being, when you do explain something, you usually uncover still greater mysteries, which are even more beautiful.
