Highlights from the Collection

Naturans Naturata began as an exploration of simple geometric forms and what happens when these forms are layered. With influence from Baruch Spinoza’s writings about active and passive Nature, Sara Langworthy explores order and connection. 

The book depicts the chaos of endless connections, and the stillness and clarity when a connection is recognized. The book examines the ideal form versus the real, and the idea that an object can be known at the point where positive and negative spaces meet.

The prints repeat from page to page, they are printed flipped and inverted from the previous print. Each image has up to eight variations and are printed as pressure prints. The intentionally imperfect drawings are sometimes minimal with easily made connections and other times heavily layered making connections more difficult to find. The shapes are repeated but no connections are made twice.

Langworthy uses a quotation from Spinoza’s Ethics as an epigraph:

“In a circle there are contained infinitely many rectangles which are equal to one another. Nevertheless, none of these rectangles can be said to exist except insofar as the circle exists; nor also can the idea of any of these rectangles exist except insofar as they are comprehended in the idea of the circle.”