Events and actions are often seen as connected by invisible threads. In some ways I saw the images in Lunar Threads as connected by the common thread of the moon. Symbolically, the moon can be interpreted as a metaphorical eye watching over the events of our world. Attached to each of these events are stories—or threads—which the moon, as perpetual silent observer, collects regardless of whether they are special are mundane. Lunar Threads was conceived as a series of works based on the intersection of these interpretations. In this series I became more ambitious with my titles—they’re much longer than those of earlier series.
I created this series in late December 1997 through mid-February 1998. By the time I finished the sixth piece, I had had enough of the remote-control nature of working digitally. I found that I wanted to return to dealing with physicality in the practice, especially texture. I had already started to paint again in January 1998, and the tactility of a material-based practice magnified the frustrations I had been having digitally. My memory of these frustrations formed the core of my concerns in 2005 about returning to an intensive digital studio practice to make the work that became Encounters.
The images are made with the same dimensions as Conversations, the series I had just completed: 7″ x 5″(17.5cm x 12.5cm), or an aspect ratio of 1.4:1.
In early 2000 I used Flash to make a short (10-second) experimental animation based on Lunar Threads 4: The Merry Trickster evades his Keeper. This and a few other short forays into time-based imaging made me realize that I would need to write scripts or storyboards before pursuing such projects in earnest. The fact that animation takes a great deal of time further deterred me from pursuing this direction. While I felt it would be creatively fulfilling for me to create key frames for someone else to animate, I had neither the time nor the inclination to engage in the more laborious aspects of animation. Having said that, my animation experiments did have some influence on later work, including Ghost Trees (2001-2002) and Crossroads (2002).