Glimpse in the Tropopause is a diptych of two views from the aircraft window: the top piece looks down on the cloud cover from above, the bottom piece looks up at it from underneath, the pair holding both sides of a passage through the weather. The colourful stripes running through both compositions recall the refraction of light that sometimes occurs at altitude, when sunlight passes through ice crystals and water droplets, splitting into brief bands of colour. The tropopause of the title is where passenger aviation lives: the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere sits near eleven kilometres, about 36,000 feet, at mid-latitudes, precisely the band in which commercial flights cruise.
Glimpse in the Tropopause – Bottom View is part of the Exclamatory Intermezzo series. This series of layered, woven paper works began in high school with a rotating mark turning from information (i) to attention (!). In its second phase, clouds enter the pattern. Years of continuous relocation and travel, and the many hours spent above the weather, had made the sky the most constant place in my life; its imagery began settling into the woven layers, softening the geometry that came before. The three layers keep their symbolism of past, present, and future, of Poland, Germany, and Canada. In these works, the clouds are still simply clouds: observed, remembered, and carried between countries.
