Ways Of Being A Cloud
Olivia Ries
Clouds, the free-form morphs of our atmosphere, create overlapping patterns and seemingly infinite configurations. It’s easy to gaze up into the sky to find a cloud to rest on while the minutes pass by. Blink and you’ll miss an entire composition you’ll most likely never see again. Missed by only a moment, captured by someone somewhere else, a single cloud found its way to you. What will you do with it? Imagine how you can become that cloud. Disassemble the elements and build them back into the cloud of random order.
Through a series of material experiments I have proposed this project, Ways of Being a Cloud. The physical component is a large-format book that displays never-ending compositions of clouds that I’ve photographed or painted, through digital editing, and or by scanning materials. The book has no binding to mimic the idea of clouds’ constantly changing form. It is left to the reader to make their own ways of being a cloud by organizing the pages to fit their own story of the cloud. The texts selected for the book show the scientific, objective aspects of clouds to offer the reader some unchanging observations. As a supplement to the book, a motion component of the project shows stop-motion of cloud images interlacing with the books in different sequences, creating distinct compositions that propose more ways to become a cloud.
For a cloud, there’s no appearance that is right or wrong.