undercurrents
A series of works with steel shards donated by machinists and artists, exploring the legacy of industrialism, time and underlying systems. They are a type of maps or contemporary ‘mandalas’ describing equilibrium, balance, time and the constant struggle between chaos and order. Hand-made from hundreds (sometimes thousands) of steel shards, the result of the same, mechanised action and yet all uniquely different, they are the result of the circumstances of a specific moment in time.
Discrete System and Devil’s in the Detail are based on geometrical shapes generated by a strand of chaos theory maths combing two types of formulas, Sierpinski carpets and Julia sets, one describing symmetries, the other chaotic systems.
All colours are determined by the process and occur naturally through heat and friction. A form of colour wheel, the colours are caused by thin-film interference and only really show up in natural light, which also means that the colours change throughout the day, depending on lighting conditions.
Affective State is based on the shape of the ripples of the piano note Do in a glass of water. The steel shards are from a heavy roughing operation on parts for the energy sector, donated by a Scottish machinist.
Formative Faculty’s snowflake-like pattern is based on a regular nonagon fractal, made from steel donated by an artist’s workshop in South London.
The girls - Isobel, Julia and Catherine. They are made with steel and bronze shards from the construction of architect Bjarke Ingels’s house boat.
