Imbued with the appearance of scientific rationality, Conrad Shawcross’ sculptures explore subjects that lie beyond the borders of geometry and philosophy; physics and metaphysics.
Born in London, Conrad is the son of biographer William Shawcross and the novelist, mythographer and cultural historian Marina Warner. Having always sought inspiration from nature and natural phenomena (from sea urchins to the dappled light patterns formed by trees), his minds-eye finds meaning in the shape of consistent patterns and laws; “Artists and scientists both look for the hidden rules that underpin reality. Sometimes they are not there – apophenia ascribes meaning to connections that don’t exist… The more the Artist loses control of its meaning the better the art is.”
Conrad’s oeuvre, veiled in the enigmatic elegance of rational systems, serves as testament to his relentless exploration of the boundless realms of cognition. With an array of complex experiments, he boldly challenges the very fabric of our fragile existence, inadvertently highlighting the interconnectivity between seemingly disparate things; Harnessing a keen focus on the elusive boundaries of human comprehension, he brings clarity to the intricate tapestry of ideas and concepts that transcend the confines of visceral understanding.
Space For Time
Conrad studied art at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, “which exposed me to a lot of other subjects, so I was influenced by maths, physics, and philosophy… I also visited the Science Museum in London quite a lot when I was younger – that was another big vein of inspiration. I’ve always been fascinated by machines.”
Common mathematical and scientific concepts that recur in Conrad’s work include the nature of: time, space, perception, and geometry. Psychogeometry is a concept that was formalised by Maria Montessori, a pioneer of children’s education. At a time when language, neural pathways and ways of thinking are yet to be set in stone – sequences of colour and form can quickly build up to complex ideas through the repetition of simple principles. Similarly, Conrad’s 2021 project Beacons is one of the largest scale artworks to have been commissioned by children.
“I always encourage people to understand the limits of their own perception, and tetrahedrons are important to me in this respect. They are forms that feel as if they should tesselate but instead, they defy their expectations and never do so, refusing to comply to our idea of how we see these shapes. I recently had the privilege of completing a residency at Nottingham’s early gravity laboratory which was deeply fascinating in this respect, making me look again at phenomena such as black holes or black hole ring down… My practice has always been very empirically led. We create prototypes, research parameters, and conduct experiments for every new idea. We approach problems in a rational, didactic way and pick apart any holes until we have a solution, but the final intent is irrational – poetic.”
His piece The Blind Proliferation is a triple chambered work. On either side of the central chamber, are two identical, mirrored, spaces, portraying the office of an anonymous mathematician. Due to the solid partitions between the chambers, it is impossible to see from one room into another, so they remain autonomous and segregated. Only the shadows that spill out and over give any clue that there is something beyond. The mathematician can only see the shadows created by the mechanism, not the mechanism itself. This mechanism has grown from Shawcross’ Slow Arc series, which took its initial inspiration from the words of biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who once described her experience of working on the spatial structure of the insulin molecule as being ‘like trying to deduce the structure of a tree from only seeing its shadow.’
Like all great art, Shawcross questions what we take for granted and encourages us to see beyond the material. Inspired by different inventions and technologies, many of his structures retain the appearance and authority of machines – but on closer inspection, they are enigmatically filled with a life of paradox and wonder; Some have an absurdist melancholy feel, while others tend to the sublime, substituting the purely functional for phenomenological experience. “I’m a great believer in linguistic determinism but also tool determinism; Learning a new word or a new tool expands the way we can think.”
The Plural Singularity
There is, claimed the title of Conrad Shawcross’ show at Victoria Miro Gallery, ‘No Such Thing As One’. No indivisible particle, then, no Leibnizian monad or Abrahamic God, and not even the number ‘0.999…’ In an interview published in the exhibition catalogue, Conrad explained that “it is difficult to find examples of one or singularity in nature and I am excited by the possibility that it is purely a human idea.”
Similar limitations dogged Binary Star (2006), The piece consisted of two long, spinning wooden arms, at the end of which revolved several smaller arms, to which yellow lights were attached. As the mechanism turned (accompanied by pleasing pre-industrial creaks and judders), the lights described elliptical shapes that converged in a variety of spectral Venn diagrams and threw dramatic shadows across the gallery walls. It takes its inspiration from William Herschel who in 1802, noted that some stars are locked in orbit around each other. The sculpture sought to question our relationship with our own, singular sun, to which we might ascribe the notion of the irreducible atom, monotheism, monarchy and any number of other iterations of the concept of ‘one’. An illustration of Karl Popper’s refutation of scientific proof (not all swans are white; not all solar systems are mono-helic) and perhaps a plea for a politics and spirituality based on the plural, not the singular.
“Art, like poetry, is interpreted differently by everyone who sees it, based on their background: gender, sexuality, political attitudes, scientific beliefs, age, geographic location, mood on that day, and so on. An artwork of mine that is particularly appropriate here is Schism, formed of twenty tetrahedrons that never rationalise and come together properly. No matter which way you put them together a crack, a schism, is evident. Again, whoever sees it sees this ‘collapse’ differently: a theologian will see that God is mischievous, an atheist will say that it proves there’s no God, some people say this proves that we’re living in a simulation, some people say it’s because the European Union is screwed. At this stage, the author is secondary to the viewer who activates the work.”
In Paradigm (Ode to the Difference Engine) (2006), the title refers to Charles Babbage’s 1822 design (not successfully realised in his lifetime) for a calculating machine that many historians now identify as the first computer. Conceived of as a failure, this machine, like Babbage’s, had no output – no product. Perhaps it was awaiting some sea change in human understanding, what Thomas Kuhn famously described in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) as a ‘paradigm shift’. Kuhn’s book, an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault, argues that scientific ‘truth’ is historically and culturally contingent, and is thus relative.
“Carlo Rovelli never fails to expand my thinking with every new idea that he explains in his books and his talks. I had the privilege of discussing ideas around art and science as part of an exhibition that I currently have on show at the Mathematical Institute, with Rovelli, the curator Fatoş Üstek, and the Nobel prize winner Sir Roger Penrose. It was deeply terrifying but fascinating, listening to their ideas as well as how they saw my work in reference to this. In terms of a more canonical poet, I have been very inspired by the work of W.B. Yeats. Last year I created a piece in homage to him – in Chiswick, where he spent some of his life.” This piece is EnwroughtLight, with gold and silver rimex leaves both blending into and reflecting its environment in a widening gyre, inspired by Yeats’ poem ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’
Steady States And Sites
“When working to commission a space, the context and material juxtaposition all play a big role in the evolution of an idea. Also, the relationship between the patron and their desires should not be underestimated.” Attracted by failed quests for knowledge in the past, Conrad often appropriates redundant theories and methodologies to create ambitious structural and mechanical montages. One of the first pieces to bring his work to prominence was at the 2004 New Blood exhibition in the Saatchi Gallery at London County Hall. Here he exhibited The Nervous Systems, a large, symmetrical, working loom producing over 20,000 metres of double-helix coloured rope every week.
In December 2004, Conrad’s commission Continuum opened at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, an installation on time and maritime themes made specifically to match the history and architecture of the venue, the Queen’s House. More recently, he has developed the scale of his practice, taking on architectural spaces with work that combines epic scope and poetic grace. Timepiece was a major new commission for the Roundhouse in 2013 in which Conrad transformed the iconic main space of this historic London building into a vast timekeeping device.
Similarly, Expansion Fields presents new and existing bodies of work that have originated from Conrad’s research into ideas around the creation of the universe and its fundamental principles. He looks to its expansion and the existence of black holes in relation to mathematics, which he believes to be intrinsic to music, and which allows him to incorporate new elements to his practice such as colour. Central to the presentation are nine large-scale outdoor sculptures titled Paradigms, presented together in a site responsive array.
“Art and culture as a whole are the invisible ether that tie us all together. It may only be a small percentage of our GDP but it’s the glue that holds society and cultural practice together. Artists are analogous to nitrogen – 80% of our atmosphere is nitrogen and yet it is a meaningless, inert gas that does nothing. Whereas oxygen (art) is a very small percentage and means everything. We could all be bankers or hedge fund managers but who would produce the cutlery, tables, chairs, decor, rooms, lights, culture, books, plays, music, and ideas that fill us with joy and nourish us as conscious creatures?”
