Alchemy marked a much needed departure for me. In the winter of 2018, I spent a week in Joshua Tree in California. The desert is a place of calm for me, a place where you can see infinitely in all directions. 

I felt an amazing sense of groundedness and expansion there. I decided to combine images that I took with images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The act of combining two of my favourite things can seem like a random form of collage, but it created a utopian aesthetic reminiscent of early sci-fi like the original Star-Trek I grew up watching.

This aesthetic ran counter to the Dark Waters series I was in the midst of for several years, which investigated dystopian ideas and aesthetics of destruction. 

The series is not only a literal vacation but became an aesthetic and artistic vacation from the deep work I had been focusing on.