TRANSPARENCY

To appear through something. Clear. From the Latin transparere, from trans, ‘through’ and parere ‘appear’, the word means ‘shining through.’ Transparency, pellucidity or diaphaneity, is the physical property of allowing light to pass through material without it appreciably scattering.

A surface is complicated by transparency. In moments, depth is betrayed by its stillness. Light complicates transparency by revealing surface where before it was disguised.

TRANSPARENCY

A shining through of something solid - see through ocean skin.

Translucent and trembling.





overlapping, interpenetrating, superimposing

Gyorgy Kepes defines transparency as a result of transparent figures interpenetrating each other without optical destruction, but transparency also implies something broader than optical effects, as it also includes spatial effects. 'Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity'* This oscillation of perception occupies a space of betweenness, in a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Optical simultaneity.

Rowe & Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, 1982

In taking shape, things influence each other, assembling, overlapping, and mixing indiscernibly. They become transparent. In this sense, we are transparent beings, our experiences appear through us in our shifting, fragmented, and multiple identities. Traces of who we were can be read through us, witnessed in tandem with who we now are, not concealed but conditioned. I read the history of a sliced tree through the rings circling its trunk. In a moment of disclosure between its wounded wooded body and mine, its existence appears.

Like Jellyfish, I will trade mobility with camouflage. Gelatinous, globular, gorgeous.
Mainly composed of water; they are buoyant, their thick mesogloea is acellular and highly transparent.

Ribbons of blue through a filter of ripples
Rise and fall. Wriggle and shimmer.
Brown, green, black. Horizonless wonder
Stone and boulder break through from under
Moss, grain, skin. Dimpled and pitted.
Mini planets in this rockpool, a cosmos scattered