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Statement

I am a multidisciplinary visual artist exploring the relationship between planetary systems, science, technology, and the cultural symbols through which humanity understands its place within the natural world. Working across photography, painting, sculpture, optics, moving image, and environmental storytelling, my practice investigates how perception shapes our relationship with the living systems that sustain us.

Central to my work is the belief that art can serve as a bridge between scientific understanding and shared cultural experience. I am interested in how scientific knowledge of the living Earth becomes publicly perceptible, culturally meaningful, and emotionally resonant—transforming observation into shared experience and new forms of collective understanding.

For many years this exploration centered on light itself. Light became both my material and my metaphor—a means of exploring how perception gives rise to meaning, and how humanity transforms observation into shared cultural understanding. Inspired by the role of natural rainbows as both physical phenomena and enduring cultural symbols, I developed an optically clear dispersive lens that allows me to "render in rainbows" using only naturally dispersed sunlight. The work remains grounded in physical reality while engaging questions of perception, symbolism, mythology, and collective memory.

Across cultures, the rainbow has long functioned as a universal symbol—a bridge between humanity and larger forces beyond itself. At the same time, astronomers, physicists, and chemists rely on light and spectrum as essential tools for understanding the universe. This convergence of science and symbolism continues to inform my practice, which often operates between observation and imagination, measurement and meaning.

I also draw inspiration from prehistoric image-making traditions and humanity's earliest relationships with the environment. Sites such as Lascaux reveal cultures in which ecological awareness, storytelling, and symbolic expression emerged directly from lived engagement with the natural world. My Impressions of the Body series draws directly from the Cueva de los Manos in Argentina, where ancient handprints became one of humanity's earliest enduring symbols of identity, presence, and connection to place.

The series consists of sculptural optical instruments conceived as conceptual telescopes. Just as scientific telescopes extend human perception across space and into the distant past, these instruments invite viewers to look back toward humanity's earliest symbolic relationship with the natural world while connecting humanity's earliest symbolic expressions with a shared planetary future. Looking through each instrument, viewers encounter kaleidoscopic body impressions formed entirely from light, transforming the act of seeing into an exploration of perception, identity, memory, and humanity's enduring relationship with the natural world. In doing so, the works bridge humanity's deepest symbolic past with its shared planetary future.

Over time, these investigations expanded beyond individual artworks toward a broader exploration of the evolution of human perception through the cultural symbols humanity creates to understand its place within the natural world. Increasingly, I became interested in how perception itself might function at the scale of cities, public space, and shared civic life, and in the possibility that environmental awareness itself could become part of everyday civic experience.

Today these investigations converge in the Climate Sphere Initiative—an evolving body of work that extends my practice from individual artworks toward a new form of civic infrastructure for the twenty-first century. Operating at the intersection of art, science, ecological systems, cultural heritage, and artificial intelligence, the Initiative explores how Environmental Intelligence can become part of everyday civic life by translating it into Shared Public Perception through a growing, globally interconnected network of Climate Spheres.

Rooted in the unique ecological character and cultural heritage of each community, every Climate Sphere reveals its Environmental Identity while contributing to Global Collective Meaning across the growing network. As these Environmental Identities are experienced and exchanged, they create new opportunities for international cultural exchange while building a living civic memory that connects environmental knowledge, cultural heritage, and shared experience across cultures and generations.

The Initiative reflects my belief that the next great cultural symbols may no longer reside in static monuments, but in living civic interfaces that enable societies to perceive, understand, and collectively respond to the changing conditions of the living Earth. Rather than representing nature symbolically, the Climate Sphere proposes something fundamentally different: a living civic symbol for planetary awareness that translates environmental intelligence into evolving public experience through the integration of environmental sensing, adaptive visualization, optics, material systems, and artificial intelligence.

The Climate Sphere represents the convergence of many long-standing investigations within my practice, bringing together perception and symbolism, light and optics, scientific understanding, cultural heritage, and humanity's evolving relationship with the living Earth. Increasingly, my work seeks to reconnect ways of knowing that have become separated in contemporary society, creating new cultural symbols through which communities can collectively perceive, understand, and engage with the living systems that sustain us.

Ultimately, my practice is driven by a belief that art can help humanity see itself more clearly within the living systems that sustain it, creating the shared understanding from which a deeper and more enduring culture of planetary awareness and environmental stewardship can emerge.

© 2023 by Paul Stremple created with Wix.com

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