Chaos Is A Diva

24th July, 2022, for the NewHandLab Covilhã. This piece comes to life from the invitation to produce work at an artist’s residency at the NewHandLab, a creative factory rooted deep into the industrial and textile history of Covilhã. Technically this piece allowed the merging of the native method of felting wool with tufting, using the local tufting set-up and materials while gathering practical know-how into the tufting method to acquire the mastery necessary for the sought-out visuals of the piece. Working with tufted wool alongside felted wool meant a complete journey into developing a texture and surface design method that would respect the nature of both materials and truthful communication of all my intentions with this complex sculpture. The core concept of this sculpture is an embodiment of the mathematical equation that describes the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder. This irregular and unpredictable time evolution of many nonlinear and complex linear systems has been named Chaos. Examples of chaotic systems include the behaviour of a waft of smoke or ocean turbulence, even the stream of a river. This equation d(t)=d(0)e.at ; has a visual side and is also known as a Lorenz manifold or attractor, in honour of mathematician Edward Lorenz. Two circles collapse on each other, creating a shape somewhat like a butterfly, from which the name butterfly effect. It was a solen choice to shape Chaos into a textile in this magnificent place with its old machine ghosts that sometimes are heard and its bright new souls that keep them company today. These associations are present and profoundly embedded into every fibre of this chaotic body while attempting to shape this complicated form to calculate and pattern out. Alongside the sharp notion that, after all, Chaos has a body to be contained in and lives in Covilhã. Portugal.