The meat on your plate

 

One of my all time favourites.

Art and Science

Went to a wonderful talk at Imperial College yesterday called 'New Perceptions in Time and Space'. It featured three speakers, Professor Colin Cunningham, Dr David Clements and artist Grace Weir.

Their discussion spanned from the history of the telescope and its impact on mankind, to developments in astrophysics and how our understanding of the universe is currently being shaped, and finally to the role that art can play in creating a social discourse for the happenings in science.

I am fascinated by the relationship between science and art, as I think that art at it purest level deals with matters that transcend language. We live in a world of sensation and as such can never encounter a black hole, galaxy or nebula, or the atomic structure of anything, on a physical level; indeed such forms are counter-intuitive to how our senses understand the world. That a rock is solid but is made up mostly of space is counter-intuitive in the extreme (see Richard Dawkins express this idea superbly here). We are aware that such things exist and are structured so, and we also must understand that on a most basic level they will always been unknown to us.

However we can conceive them and attempt to understand them, and art is the perfect conduit in which we can explore the feelings such knowledge evokes. The first language of science is maths, and although beautiful, it is primarily functional. Art has the ability to express emotion and considerations, turning concepts into percepts.
Art alone can express the humanity of science.

299 702 520 m/s and 200 668 896 m/s

Here is another piece that Xavier and I collaborated on. We created the monoliths for a show called 'Bold Tendencies III' which ran from June to September this year. The titles of the pieces are in the post title, being the speed of light through air and the speed of light through perspex respectively. The monoliths played with the idea of capturing light, light as the defining feature of our existence, and in retrospect resembled inverted voids. They were positioned so that shadows fell long, and and by referencing sun-worship aimed to explore how light defines our existence. Plus they were big, shiny and pervy, and definitely not designed to be sympathetic to the industrial environment.

Suspended Plane

Here's a piece I did this summer with the talented Xavier Poultney.
It was in a show we helped to organise called 'Palimpsest' which ran at the same time as the RCA SHOW 2.
The we projected a film on the plane to create a warped sinse of size and depth. More pictures and a film are to come.

Writing for MurmurArt

First piece for MurmurArt here. More to come.