A composition that is part abstract art and part diagram — a large cluster of circles in the lower two-thirds of the picture, above which the upper third is nearly empty white space. The circles are of varying sizes, overlapping and adjacent, each one containing internal marks: diagonal lines, grid patterns, color fills, faces, small objects. No two circles are the same.
The variety within the circles is remarkable. Some are divided by simple diagonal lines into colored wedges. Some contain grid patterns — teal horizontal lines, vertical black lines — suggesting windows or screens. One at lower right contains what appears to be a small face with circular eyes. One at center contains a letter-like form. One at upper center, darker and more opaque, reads as a filled sphere rather than an outlined circle. The diversity of internal content is the work's subject: each circle is a different world, a different system, a different possibility.
The composition has the character of a taxonomy or a periodic table — Sidney organizing his visual vocabulary into discrete circular containers and arranging them in a field, seeing how many different things a circle can hold. It connects directly to the jeweler's eye — the way a settings tray might hold different stones, each in its own compartment — and to the biological and cosmological imagery throughout the collection.
The near-empty upper portion is unusual and deliberate — the circles accumulate from the bottom up, rising toward the white. They have not yet filled the space above them. This upward aspiration, this incompleteness, gives the composition a sense of process still underway.