Untitled (detail)
Pencil and gouache on paper
30cm x 42cm
© 2010 Tammy Lu

“It seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside, some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real external world that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of which it helps to ensure. What a beautiful move, apparently sacrificing resemblance at each stage only to settle again on the same meaning, which remains intact through sets of rapid transformations. The discovery of this strange and contradictory behavior is worthy of the discovery of a forest able to create its own soil.”

Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (1999)