Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope is a collection about different points of view: seeing the world through a kaleidoscope, or seeing the same object through a kaleidoscope of shard-fractured glass.

The work began as a meditation on fractured perception, memory, conversation, and the strange human experience of piecing together fragments of information. A conversation can happen in a fractured way, where two people are discussing the same subject but from spiraling kaleidoscopic points of view, through different frames and different shards of glass. Memory itself is kaleidoscopic: we remember fragments, and then the imagination fills in the rest.

The collection also carries an homage to David Hockney, following his recent passing. Laurence Fuller had portrayed Hockney as a character in the television series Minx, shortly before beginning a collaboration with artists inspired by Hockney’s portraits and legacy. Hockney also held a personal connection to Fuller’s family: he was a close friend of Laurence’s late father, the art critic Peter Fuller, whose writings include interviews and conversations with Hockney that remain deeply enlightening. In Peter Fuller’s book Beyond the Crisis in Art, many names are crossed out on the cover — Warhol, Hamilton, Caro, Pollock, Stella, Andre, Burden — while Hockney’s name is left. One of many mysterious clues left within a legacy of writing on art.

Kaleidoscope extends that inheritance into poetry, cinema, and immersive digital art. It is about the way perspective shapes experience, and the way a single subject can contain many ways of being seen. It also responds to the way we live behind flat screens: taking in art, ideas, images of people we love, places we want to be, and futures we want to enter. Even when our timelines are filled with art, the amount of information we absorb from different points of view can become a swirl.

At the end of the day, when we close our eyes, we see a kaleidoscope of happenings: fragments of art, voices, images, conversations, and memories spinning together. Doomscrolling can scramble the brain and shatter a single perspective into many.

Kaleidoscope asks what happens when that glass is shattered. What exists beyond the screen? What kind of paradise might exist beyond the shattered glass frame?

At the time, Fuller was preparing for a long trip to Thailand — the longest period he had spent outside Los Angeles since arriving there fifteen years earlier. The unknown, and the need to embrace the unknown, became part of the work. In Kaleidoscope: The Unknown, this took shape through the symbol of the elephant: a national symbol of Thailand, but also an image of vast memory. Elephants carry memory across great expanses, keeping track of landmarks, experiences, and what has happened before. That sense of memory — immense, fragmented, instinctive — became another form of the kaleidoscope.

The first poem in the collection, Kaleidoscope Green, begins with an emerald feather found by the banks of a canal. The feather becomes a quill, a symbol of inspiration, and a way into the handmade nature of poetry:

For Fuller, poetry often arrives close to its first form. Too much editing can take away the beauty and the flaws. If you try to trim the thorns too much, the rose itself becomes too perfect. The beauty of poetry is that it is handmade.

Kaleidoscope is a work of poetry, memory, digital art, and perspective. It is a shattered glass frame, a conversation across fragments, and an invitation to look again — through color, number, memory, place, and the many perspectives by which we come to understand the world.