My Love Affair with the Circle

Pardon the existential pun, but I don’t know where my love affair with the circle started. Some of my visual artworks are linear landscapes. Even those are created through simple cycles of breath. An in/out circular process that lets my mind and heart loop as I set down each colorful horizontal line.

My college thesis was an amalgamation of circular poetry and images, a philosophical work that dared to challenge the primacy of academic prose and rationality in favor of softer and rounder ambiguities. The work narrowly passed for credit and only under the cover of a forgiving oral defense.

I was just beginning to find visual languages to get closer to my own philosophical renderings. Ubuntu, togetherness, completion — some concepts can’t be made well without circular shapes.

I was grappling with dichotomies at the time, deep in study with Judith Butler’s writing and enthralled with Canadian and French feminists lacunae and silences. Ying/yang and infiniti symbols gave me a way to account for flows of power. Visually, I could better illustrate such polarities inside their discursive bonds, binds, and flips.

Three-dimensional globes appeared as I began to study particular domains and discourses. Leadership, culture, art, nature — intersecting orbs and bubbles adhered to one another in unusual combinations. I began to visualize the language domains in a diverse room or the way city cultures overlap and intrude on each other.

Deleuze’s rhizomatics helped me apply asymmetry, movement, and change to my visual models. Suddenly, a circle shape became a tunnel and a tuber. Sadly, also a tumor. Circlular movements shouldn’t be mistaken for cuddly kindness. Circles famously exclude, too.

Theories of teamwork, community, and advocacy are well-served by rounded edges, thinking in loopings, and widening the circle to unique voices and contributions. Embrace of the earth, folds in time, my own rhythmic bobbing — each come with centering qualities to locate my place in each moment and make a stone’s ripple in our time.