Astral

The centre is the beginning. Every instant of your capture advances one notch around the axis and throws a line outward: the wider the artwork grows, the more time has passed. The outer edge is the end of your moment.

So there is no top and no bottom. A radial work is looked at like an object rather than a page, and it changes with where you stand: from across the room you see a mass and its general rhythm; at a metre you pick out the lines one by one.

The two traces are not laid out in two separate zones. They occupy the same space and cross, which is what gives Astral its density: in places it becomes impossible to say which of the two bodies produced a line.

Two colours, chosen at checkout. The first appears when the heart speeds up, the second when it slows down. Between them, the resting rhythm stays black, and it is what holds the drawing together and makes it readable.

The balance is not something you choose. A calm capture gives an artwork that is almost entirely black, crossed by rare flashes; a restless capture gives the opposite. It is the one part of the work that neither you nor the studio decides.

A ten-minute capture and an hour-long one do not give the same artwork, and the difference shows immediately on this artwork. Time coils around the centre: the longer it runs, the wider the ring grows and the tighter the lines pack against one another.

A short capture gives an open shape, where each line stays isolated and readable from across the room. A long capture gives a dense mass, almost textile up close, whose reading asks you to step nearer. Thirty minutes is the balance point, and it is where most couples stop of their own accord.

It is the one variable you genuinely control. Model and colours are chosen at checkout, the composition escapes you, but the duration is entirely yours: you press End whenever you want.

For those who think of themselves as a “we”. Astral makes a single shape out of two people, and that shape would make no sense with only one.

If the idea of two traces mixing bothers you more than it appeals, the other artwork exists precisely for that: Two Shores stacks them without ever confusing them.

Three formats on fine art paper: 8.5 × 11, 13 × 19 and 17 × 22 inches. Framing and an additional print, printed in the same pass, are optional.

The artwork is printed once. No file is handed over, no reprint is possible, and a numbered certificate ties the print to the capture it came from.