Aesthetic dimensions: Conrad Shawcross – Protomodel

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Frances Follin finds art in London's Science Museum

The gallery that inspired modernist sculptor Henry Moore and Surrealist painter and illustrator Max Ernst in the 1930s has provided inspiration for Conrad Shawcross, artist in residence at London’s Science Museum for the past year.

For some thought-provoking art this summer, head for the Maths Gallery where his exhibition ‘Protomodel’ is on show until 13 November 2011. You don’t even have to be able to add up to be intrigued and delighted by what you will find. In fact, the big challenge is separating the maths exhibits from the art ones. Conrad Shawcross has been visiting the gallery since he was 16 getting inspiration at each visit from the ‘interesting conceptual objects’ (his words) that he has found there.

His works share cases with objects from the museum’s collection. My eye was caught by a case of colourful forms, exploding stars, polyhedra apparently decorated with stylised flowers. Surely these must be some of the art exhibits? But no, they are part of the Maths Gallery’s normal display.

What about these wonderful glass forms that look so fragile and so impossible? No, not art, but Klein bottles – objects with no edge, no inside or outside (or at least, the inside is the outside and vice versa) and apparently cannot be constructed properly in three dimensions, but there they are. Felix Klein, a German mathematician, conceptualised them and Alan Bennett, a scientific glass blower, made them.

I resort to the gallery guide to tell the art works from the mathematical models. Then all becomes clear – and even more fascinating.

‘Hyperbolic Swarf Drawings’ consist of shavings created when blocks of colourful substances are turned and drilled in complex fashion on a lathe. Think of peeling an apple in one piece, and the way the single strip of peel twists and curves. Then imagine a much longer peeling full of twists and curves, curling around and doubling back on itself.  Shawcross produced his ‘peelings’ (swarf) by drilling into blocks of different substances at varying speeds and angles. The beautiful blue ‘flower’ (or coral or some such creature from the ocean?) that you can see in our image is one of the results. You will want to take one home!

‘The Celestial Metres’ are more thought provoking than beautiful. The modern ‘metre’ of metric measurement came about during the French Revolution. Eager to cast off all ‘irrational’ subjective units of measurement, the Revolutionaries defined the new measurement as one 10-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Conrad Shawcross asked himself what this measurement would be on each of the other planets in the solar system. So in cases in the gallery you can see what a ‘metre’ would look like on Jupiter (very long!) or Mercury (weeny) and all the other planets.

In ‘Perimeter Studies’, Shawcross has ‘drawn out’ the surfaces of a dodecahedron (an object with 12 flat surfaces) to create apparently exploding forms. The Greek philosopher Plato associated the regular dodecahedron with the heavens and so these apparent explosions suggest the idea of the ‘Big Bang’ thought to have been the origin of the universe.

Music and maths have long been associated. The Museum’s pendulum-driven Harmonograph machine creates complex spirograph-like patterns in  a range of shapes, with moiré-like effects on their surfaces. Inspired by this, Shawcross developed a pendulum-driven machine that would produce drawings from which he could make three-dimensional objects. The five bronze ‘trees’ he created are on display. They can be thought of as visual expressions of two musical notes, interfering and entwining with one another as they gradually fade away.

Time Rule (352 minutes)is a colourful rope created by two machines installed in the disused Kingsway tram tunnel in London. Over the course of a month, these machines gradually moved away from each other while spinning out a connecting rope between them. Time Rule (352 minutes) is a piece of this rope, created in 352 minutes – so it represents a way of measuring time in terms of space, and vice versa. A light year, the distance light travels in one year, is too great a distance for the human brain to apprehend, but a length of rope that one can see, created in a human time scale, allows the equation of time and distance to be much more easily grasped.

The Science Museum has a running programme of Arts Projects, which are often overlooked by art lovers. So don’t be put off if you think that maths and science are ‘not your thing’. The Science Museum is only across the road from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and well worth a visit.