Kinetic light installations, geometrical experiments, ropes and rope machines, balance, mathematical ratios and harmonics… I’ve discovered the work of Conrad Shawcross a few years ago in an art fair and it was instant love. And that is in spite of having very inadequate knowledge of the mathematical rules his work alludes to. Maybe that’s part of the appeal. Shawcross’s work is currently at the gallery Victoria Miro in London and i doubt you can see a more exciting show in town this month.
Entitled Sequential, the exhibition experiments with the shapes, ideals and formulas of mathematics and more generally, the challenges of envisioning information and the invisible.
Conrad Shawcross, The Blind Aesthetic, 2011
The Blind Aesthetic is a large glass box divided in two. One side houses a mechanical arm with a light at its end. The arm moves through a series of stepped ratios based on harmonics, creating a sequence of loops of light described in mathematics as torus knots. The speed and intensity of the light causes its path to burn onto the retina, and thus for this geometry to be revealed fleetingly to the viewer. The other side of the glass box looks like a small working room with an empty stool facing a wall of colourful drawings made by a mathematician or maybe an artist.
Conrad Shawcross, Skein Cone, 2011
Conrad Shawcross, Skein Cone, 2011
Skein Cone hangs a few steps away. And now i’m mostly going to quote the press review:
The delicate suspended sculpture elaborates on the formal rather than mechanical elements of Shawcross’s ongoing rope machine series. A complex steel structure divides and subdivides out over a spherical plane resulting in hundreds of individual nodes to each of which is tied a coloured woollen yarn or skein that is pulled down to a shared focal point at the centre of the spherical plane above.
In the gallery upstairs, a grid of sixteen sculptures comprising of four sets of four works, all of which reinforce the exploration of series and sequences in Shawcross’s practice. A set of geometrically rigorous Perimeter Studies exploit the properties of the dodecahedron (a regular twelve-sided solid). These are shown together with a new series in welded bronze that take the twenty-sided icosohedron as their fundamental shape. Both groups of works are preoccupied with ideas of the big bang and thus can be seem as radiant diagrams of expansion or contraction.
The third set in the grid is entitled Fraction and is a series of spiraling conal forms that seek to visually represent the mathematics of sound, and are best described as three-dimensional descriptions of chords falling into silence. Each piece differs subtly in the binary harmonic ratio and therefore the musical chord they represent.
Installation view, Victoria Miro Galley, 2011
Perimeter Studies, 2011
Conrad Shawcross | Sequential remains open at the gallery Victoria Miro in London through 1 October 2011. Shawcross is also showing Protomodel in the Mathematics gallery, at the Science Museum through 13 November 2011.
Measure interviewed the artist 2 years ago.