Veins of Porcelain: The Cartography of Splintered Minds

Veins of Porcelain: The Cartography of Splintered Minds reimagines Jackson Pollock’s  Number 23 as an introspective odyssey into identity, memory, and the invisible architectures of thought. In this surreal conceptualization, Pollock’s once-wild, web-like abstraction is drawn inward—no longer an external burst of chaos but a network mapped across human consciousness. The original expressive marks are now puzzles of neural rhythm, fitted into silhouettes of dual selves caught between recognition and fracture. 

Two profiles—one facing left in shadow, one facing right in luminous grayscale—anchor the composition. They do not clash, but coexist. The void between them forms a shared language of presence and absence, a quiet suggestion of the multiplicity within each of us. Their faces are not complete. Instead, they are made of puzzle pieces—some solid, others missing, many translucent—each imprinted with Pollock’s dense and frantic strokes. The pattern of his marks—black slashes, tangled arcs, serpentine lines—have now become fingerprints of thought, embedded into skin, bone, and memory. 

Pollock’s palette here is rendered almost entirely in grayscale—silvers, soft ash, spectral whites, slate black, and dull graphite tones. The absence of vivid color is intentional. It is not a void but a restraint, a gesture toward internality rather than spectacle. Black is not despair—it is depth. White is not clarity—it is the haze of forgetting. The soft gray puzzles—delicately splintered across the composition—feel less like cold stone and more like softened marble, worn by the weight of remembering. The lines drip in delicate whispers rather than screams, the paint no longer flung but woven. 

Above the twin profiles, fractured puzzle pieces float upward, dissolving into the cracked white void of the background. Some pieces are tethered by fine black lines to spheres—simple black dots suggesting neurons or synapses, memory nodes or artificial structures trying to hold on. A large puzzle-shaped wing structure, made of a Pollock-infused pattern, rises like a butterfly barely stitched together by logic or language. It hovers between beauty and breakdown. 

The background mimics the look of cracked porcelain, a nod to the title’s metaphor and the fragility of the mind. These fractures do not destroy—they reveal. Through the cracks, one glimpses the threads that tie identity together, and how easily those threads shift, tangle, or disappear. 

As an artist, my thought while reinterpreting  Number 23 was rooted in a very personal meditation: what does it mean to contain contradiction within one self? Pollock’s original painting, a composition of tightly controlled drip and dynamic force, felt like a mind trying to both speak and silence itself. I wanted to bring that internal war to the surface—not as a scream, but as a diagram. 

This piece is about the self as puzzle—not a problem to be solved, but a structure always in flux. Each profile is a map of how memory imprints itself, how trauma leaves residue, and how we attempt to organize what cannot be made whole. The use of Pollock’s texture within the figures is deliberate: his frantic marks become our thought patterns. His abstraction becomes our anatomy. His chaos becomes our inheritance. 

There is no single focus here, just as there is no single identity. The figures are both incomplete and unified. The shadows we carry mirror the fragments we present. The missing pieces are not lost—they are still forming. The black dots and connective lines above suggest that memory isn’t static, but electrical—firing, fading, and forming endlessly. 

Veins of Porcelain: The Cartography of Splintered Minds doesn’t resolve Pollock’s chaos—it reframes it. It sees his wild lines not as eruptions, but as scaffolding for thought. It shows that identity is not painted—it is collaged. We are all in the process of assembling who we are, one trembling brushstroke at a time.