Chris Jordan: Beauty Emerging

Wellsprings of joy

“The Universe has formed itself into everything that exists,
including the human brain, you and me:
consciousness that can think and perceive
and look wide-eyed back at itself.”

CHRIS JORDAN (born 1963) is an American photographic artist, filmmaker, cultural activist and art educator. He is best known for his hard-hitting artworks that face the darkness of consumer mass culture, including his projects entitled Running the Numbers, Midway and Intolerable Beauty. His paradigm-breaking film, Albatross (2017), continues to reach audiences around the world with a heart-opening story of birds on a remote island in the Pacific, whose bodies are filled with plastic.

In this month’s guest post for The Culturium, Chris showcases his latest series of photographic projects, Beauty Emerging, that explores directly the subtle beauty of the Chilean landscape. Comprising two complementary assignments, Ecstatic Desolation, captured on Lake Llanquihue, and To the End of the World, compiled in Punta Arenas, he formulates the way in which in the midst of far-flung isolation, he found the inherent mysteries of the Universe, subsequently framed within his exquisite images and prose.

Ecstatic Desolation (Lago Llanquihue, Chile)

The pandemic of 2020-2021 found me stranded unexpectedly in a quiet village on a huge and marvellously beautiful lake in the south of Chile. This strange time brought my life a much-needed pause and, like many others, I experienced a kind of forced contemplative retreat. The isolation here was intense at times and I also felt relief from the chaotic pace of what previously had passed for normal.

Exploring daily along the lakeshore in all conditions of light and weather ranging from mirror quiet to whipping storms, revisiting the same coves and rock formations, again and again, my eye slowly attuned itself to the subtleties of Lago Llanquihue. The ever-changing surface of the water became my meditation. Time slowed down. Waveforms expressed themselves on radically different scales and my camera exposures stretched from seconds to minutes to hours. Underneath the layers of movement, a stillness began to reveal itself.

This experience offered a container to hold and metabolize the dark news emanating from home and around the world. From this place of repose, I have watched the spread of unconscious fear in the public mind, morphing into collective psychosis like an immense nascent spirit-demon willing itself into existence. I wondered how to hold it all in balance and I felt the enormous silence of this lake become an increasingly powerful ally. Whatever absurdities are happening in human culture and in our own minds, at its centre is an empty space between thoughts. Its silence beckons the soul toward a widening perspective and, in this space, we are offered access to the healing power of beauty. Beauty’s medicine reminds us of our loving nature. May its eternal song illuminate our hearts.

Beauty Emerging

The serendipitous gorgeousness of the living world offers endless sources of awe. At every scale in the Universe, complex forms arise spontaneously, self-organizing from nothing into something. Clouds of dust whirl into galaxies, stars and planets. Fractal landscapes of mountains, valleys and oceans appear in infinite variations. Molecules align into crystals, self-assembling the building blocks for life. Plants materialize from the earth like slow-motion cosmic math explosions, spinning raw minerals into impossibly varied forms. Flower buds spiral from branches like Fibonacci mandalas dancing out of the void. Every leaf is as complex as a city; forests are incomprehensibly vast civilizations. The Universe has formed itself into everything that exists, including the human brain, you and me: consciousness that can think and perceive and look wide-eyed back at itself.

Despite all we know from science, philosophy and spiritual traditions, the primary impulse that creates all things remains fundamentally mysterious. And the more we learn about our Universe, from the quantum to the celestial, the more wondrous it all becomes. Emergent complexity appears before us everywhere; we are immersed in layers of its beauty in every moment. We live in an infinite museum of unimaginably fantastical artworks made by an unknowable artist.