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Statement

I am a visual artist exploring the relationships between science, technology, and the cultural symbols that bind humanity to the natural world. Natural rainbows—generated by sunlight—function both as a language of the stars and as a scientific key: astronomers, physicists, and chemists rely on dispersion and spectrum to interpret the universe.

To work within this intersection, I developed an optically clear dispersive lens of my own design that allows me to “render in rainbows.” Using only naturally dispersed sunlight, my work remains grounded in physical reality even as it moves through myth, perception, and cultural memory.

Across cultures, the rainbow has long served as a universal symbol of hope and as a bridge between humanity and the divine, between material reality and myth. I understand the role of the artist in similar terms—as an intermediary who translates between scientific understanding and symbolic experience.

I look to prehistory for guidance in confronting contemporary environmental crisis. Cultures more than 10,000 years old lived in intimate relationships with their ecosystems, and their earliest storytelling traditions emerged directly from observation of the physical world. Sites such as Lascaux in France and the Cueva de los Manos in Argentina reveal early makers of image and myth who never separated spirit from environment.

Drawing on another enduring cultural symbol—the telescope—I create sculptural optical instruments inspired by the handprints of the Cueva de los Manos, most notably in my Impressions of the Body series. Through this work, I seek to reestablish ancient cultural links to nature and to question the modern notion of “humanity” as something separate from the natural world.

Working across photography, painting, sculpture, optics, and short film, I approach movement between mediums as a form of synthesis—each discipline strengthening the whole.

My current body of work, Climate Spheres, extends these investigations into a planetary scale. These globes—constructed from materials including brass, aluminum, wood, marble, crystal, porcelain, and integrated digital displays—integrate real-time data from some of Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems. By translating scientific information into perceptible form, the work makes environmental change tangible, immediate, and shared.

In an era marked by fragmented discourse and widespread disinformation, the climate crisis is also a crisis of understanding and cohesion. Climate Spheres are conceived as a unifying symbolic instrument—one that brings science, culture, and perception into a single experiential framework, inviting renewed awareness and collective responsibility for the living world.

© 2023 by Paul Stremple created with Wix.com

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