Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest body of fresh-water, represents a precious biogeography. Eighty per cent of its thousands of species of plants, fish, and animals are endemic; existing naturally only in this area. Knigge’s interest is in what can be observed in the top few feet of its surface which, for close to five months a year, is frozen solid with ice. Pictured in his mandalas are ripples, fractures and drifting air bubbles suspended in the clear transparent solid mass, as if preserved in amber. What appear to be amoebae, galaxies, or hieroglyphs allude to views through a scientist’s microscope, an astronomer’s telescope, or an explorer’s binocular as well as referencing the sacred and divine. The viewer is transported to what the unaided eye, or mind, fails to see.
