For the Curious

How It Started.

I've been blessed/cursed with what is called "2E" wiring, which essentially means my brain can chew through complicated material without difficulty, but cannot remember to drink water without an alarm. The complicated stuff entertains me. The simple stuff is where I struggle. Boring tasks are the worst kind of struggle, because there's nothing for the chew-y part of my brain to do, and so it starts eating me.

I had a long and horrifically boring task I needed to complete and I was losing my mind while doing it. So I started listening to MIT courseware classes to keep my brain occupied while my hands typed data I wasn't even reading.
I bounced from language studies to gravitational mechanics and then into spectroscopy. Specifically, non-linear coherent spectroscopy. Lasers.
That brought me down several rabbit holes that I really enjoyed and eventually dumped me out into astronomical spectroscopy. I have a decent telescope, so I decided to order a diffraction grating to see if I could measure and study elements within celestial bodies I observed.
What arrived was really intended more for science class I think, and it was all but useless for study — but I accidentally discovered something magical instead of scientific. Actually, it was entirely scientific, just not measurably so.

While I was examining this useless tool, the morning sun was coming in my windows. I looked through the grating toward the sunlight and was mesmerized. It was breathtaking. Intoxicating. I found myself pointing it at everything, and then taking pictures of things I wanted to remember in case I never got to see them again. And then I wasn't just taking pictures of the morning sunlight — I started taking the grating with me wherever I went, just in case something beautiful appeared.
In the year since I took my first photo, I have observed everything from sunlight on snow to droplets of water to penguin feathers to jellyfish skin. Do jellyfish have skin? Jellyfish membranes? You know — the stuff. I find myself pulling the little square out at dinner parties and in bathrooms and at hockey games and anywhere the light does something interesting.
And now I find myself having to admit that I'm creating. I'm making something I'm proud of, and for the first time, I feel like I'm truly good at something.

This practice is also how I'm carrying someone I lost. A friend, a poet, an artist, the kind of person who taught me to see beauty in the ordinary. He's not here for any of this, and that's the hardest part. But he's in every title I choose, in every absurd-and-mundane pairing, in every moment I pull the grating out and look at the world a little sideways. He saw the desire to create in me when I was sure I lacked the skill.

Is this something the world needs? Arguably, no. And at the same time — maybe so. Beauty isn't optional for some of us. Some of us need reminders of beauty in the everyday. I guess I'm still looking for beauty in the mundane. Trying to pull ridiculous drama and chaos out of ordinary things.

Here's the best part: I don't even own a camera. I don't own a camera, and a photograph I took of a bathroom mirror, on my phone, through a busted non-scientific tool, is about to be hanging in a gallery across the ocean.

What even is life? It's beautiful, that's what it is. I hope I can help you see some of the beauty in the mundane too through my busted square and my cell phone. 

Enjoy.

(Counterpoints: Nerd Suite. Two goofs in one.)

About Cassie

Cassie is still the kid on the couch. She is a self-taught photographer based in North Texas, working exclusively in diffraction grating photography. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including an upcoming exhibition in Glasgow, Scotland. She has been distracted by something just beyond a camera since approximately 1987.