Studio

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s I was interested in the visual synthesis of complex structures in my paintings, following the observation that the appeal of complexity  arises neither from predetermined organization nor from complete randomness: complex structures emerge from the interactions of their parts. 

I started work on each large painting by making hundreds of small independent paintings (5 to 15 in. per side) that I called “fragments”. Then I was building larger, more complex compositions by arranging and rearranging the earlier painted fragments. In this process, higher-order structures were emerging, unpredictable yet not random. 

I used many (up to 100) such fragments in my  paintings, which gave me unlimited possibilities of arranging and rearranging them.

Billy Klüver and Julie Martin described the day in the spring of 1994 when Tudor first saw Ogielska’s paintings:

Tudor immediately saw a correspondence between her methods of working with images and his building performance instruments from disparate parts that could be activated in many different ways. Tudor suggested that he and Ogielska develop a project together that combined sound and images. Ogielska remembers: “He told me,‘I want to see the music. I want the sound to have shape and shape to have color.’”

And we did just that.