Wave Motion is Gaudiani’s most recent body of work, which comprises both still images and video. She is inspired by her early love of physics and the study of wave motion, and her exploration of how the invisible wind becomes visible as it takes shape winding through grasses, trees, and, finally, water—the element where we all have our beginnings. The water has become both her canvas and her palette. All of the photographs and videos in Wave Motion derive from Gaudiani’s documentation of how light reflects and refracts in water. Using only her camera and lenses—no computer has played a role in the generation of these works—Gaudiani selected three bodies of water in Colorado, California, and Mexico to which she returns over and over. Different seasons, times of day, and weather conditions, contribute to the vast range of abstractions and images as the reflected and refracted light changes what can be seen.
Gaudiani realizes that a person merely walking more slowly and looking more closely will not see what her photographs and videos reveal. Because the human eye is limited in what it can see, a device—in this case her camera and lens—is necessary to capture the abstract worlds that the waves’ motion creates, not unlike the Universe’s shapes recorded by the Webb Space Telescope.
The still images and videos of Wave Motion encourage us to enter a meditative state that transcends the chaos of the world, calling us to a prelapsarian, primordial space—before time’s judgments intrude on our capacity to feel first.
