The lay of the land: Turbulent flow and Lissa Paul Resum&: A partir rl'utt exal~zetl des illustrations de Ted Harrisot~, lesq~ielles e'clzappent 6 la tentation des "disco~irs totalisatzts" du de'but du si?cle, L. Pall1 e'tablit la the'orie de la pbirivocite' de la lecture du texte e'crit et vis~iel. Ted Harrison's pictures are often described as "surrealist" or "magic realist" or "primitive" or "naive" or "childlikem-all terms emphasising their unlikeness to pictures that might be described as "natural" or "real."' While I'd never be so foolish in this post-structuralist age as to try to define in absolute terms any of those signifiers-aware as I am of their arbitrariness-I would like to suggest that Harrison's pictures are a lot more "natural" than they seem. What you see depends on how you look. If you look with eyes informed by late twentieth-century chaos theories of new physics, then Harrison's pictures don't look so abstract any more. Instead, they begin to fit into categories increasingly being used to define the natural world. Chaos theories describe-in the new mathematical terms of fractal geom- etry-what are now known as self-similar structures. Those natural shapes include tree bark, snow flakes, cloud formations, mountain ranges, waves, the turbulent flow of water as it tumbles over rocks, and other recursive but never identical structures: constantly shifting shapes that defy conventional predict- ability. Benoit Mandelbrot inventedfractal geometry (both the name and the method) in 1975, to describe the natural shapes Euclidean geometry can't: "Clouds are not spheres," he explains, "mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line" (I). Although I have no evidence at all that Harrison had ever even heard of Mandelbrot or fractal geometry, I couldn't help being struck by the fractal way in which Harrison describes his own work: "There are no straight lines in nature," he says simply in an interview with Lamont Bassett. I first began to think of Harrison's pictures as chaotic landscapes when I realized they reminded me of weather maps: isobar bands of colour, coding shifting barometric pressures. I found myself thinking of his pictures as "dynamic and nonlinear, yet predictable in [their] very unpredictability ." That's aphrase I borrowed not from art criticism, or from a review of Harrison's work, but from a description-by Katherine Hayles in Chaos bound: Orderly disorder CCL 70 1993 63