Chris Parks

Chris Parks is the mastermind behind what has been much touted as the 2001-esque sequence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life – a hallucinatory swirling miasma of imagery that takes into its sway the history of time, the vast mysteries of the universe and metaphysical notions of life before birth. Considering the profundities at the heart of Malick’s celluloid oeuvre, it's little surprise he was drawn to the work of the artist, who famously also worked on Aronofsky’s The Fountain. There is something compellingly archetypal about the self-coined “fluid paintings” Parks creates – a psychedelic visual experience taking its cue from the natural world that is both strangely familiar and entirely alien in nature, tapping into a vein of collective consciousness like an intravenous shot of mescaline. Here, AnOther presents a short film by the artist and he tells us why the experience of wonder and the random possibilities of chance are integral to his practice.

What would you say was your inspiration, what drives you to create these fluid images?
I have always had a fascination with nature and I guess it’s hard to disentangle that from my father’s work as a biological illustrator, and then a natural history filmmaker. That influenced my creative path, although I ended up working in this field via a rather tortuous route, having originally studied engineering and industrial design at The Royal College. As a child, I was always fascinated by the design of nature and the magic of it – the fact that it was a completely alien world when you got down to smaller levels. I suppose that has sort of driven both the inspiration for the artwork as well as the techniques I use – some of the things I am shooting now are very organic, nature-based materials, and a lot of the materials I am using or the processes I am filming, are natural, organic processes, so it’s all these wheels within wheels.

What is your process in the film work?
There are a number of different techniques but they are all derived from a similar process. I basically create paintings within a very small volume of liquid. The fact that it is contained within a volume of liquid allows me to work in three dimensions, and because it is a very small volume I have some control.

You talk about control but there must be a strong element of chance. I see the work as pure abstraction…
Yes, it's a combination of the control I am trying to apply in the design and the organic random mistakes that come out of it. I love that about it. It’s actually what I think attracted both Terry Malick and Darren Aronofsky. Both of them were drawn to the organic-ness of it, and the fact that a lot of that comes from its unpredictability. They both used it as a medium for communicating something, and what Terry has done with it is a very personal thing that very much draws on his life. Funnily enough, some of the images in the film were actually shot by my dad – Terry approached my dad for some of the marine imagery he was shooting thirty years ago. For The Tree of Life he was looking for some of this more abstract pre-birth, outer space, big bang-type imagery that comes across in my work. He came to me totally independently, not realising the link.

Is there something metaphysical you are seeking to communicate?
There are a multitude of things I want to communicate really, and although the starting point for the different pieces vary, I always start with an idea I am trying to convey, or an experience.  I guess on some levels the work is trying to communicate directly, and trying to convey something directly to the viewer, at other times it’s really trying to draw an experience or feeling – the intangible. The abstract work particularly is about trying to illustrate the indescribable, and convey the experience of wonder.

It touches on this notion Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested – that we experience wonder when trying to decipher between the artificial and the real…
Exactly. I guess there are three main strands to what I find myself doing – there’s this side that we are talking about, the fluid art, which is a much more abstract, much rawer thing that I am communicating, then there’s the natural history side, which finds its root in the natural world, and then there is the element of working in three dimensions… I believe that science, nature and art are so interwoven and it’s the combination of the three that fascinates me. The tendency in our society to separate different fields of knowledge can be frustrating.

Text by John-Paul Pryor