Major mathematically-inspired Oxford exhibition - by acclaimed sculptor Conrad Shawcross

The Mathematical Institute at Oxford University is hosting one of the UK’s largest exhibitions by the celebrated artist Conrad Shawcross, open to the public from Wednesday, 28 September .

The exhibition brings together almost 40 sculptures realised by the artist over the last 17 years.

Conrad Shawcross, who studied at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art, is the youngest current member of the Royal Academy of Arts and has a global reputation for specialising in mechanical sculptures based on philosophical and scientific ideas. Imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality, these explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics, and metaphysics.
This new exhibition, Cascading Principles: Expansions within Geometry, Philosophy, and Interference, places a variety of Shawcross’s work across three floors of the Mathematical Institute, forming a web of relationships and correspondences which emerge as the viewer moves through the building.

Drawn to mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the early stages of his artistic career, Shawcross places a strong emphasis on the nature of matter, and on the relativity of gravity, entropy, and the nature of time itself. Like a scientist working in a laboratory, he conceives each work as an experiment. Modularity is key to his process and many works are built from a single essential unit or building block.

In arranging these works within the Mathematical Institute, Cascades places them in a dialogue with the intellectual work of its occupants and the ideas that originally inspired their creation.

Highlights of the exhibition include:

• Schisms: an artistic demonstration of the failure of tetrahedrons to tessellate. This brings twenty tetrahedrons together to form a sphere, which results in a deep crack and ruptures that permeate its surface. This failure of its geometry means that it cannot succeed as a scientific model, but it is this very failure that allows it to succeed as an art work.
• The four Beacons, each composed of two coloured, perforated disks that move in counter rotation to one another, patterning sunlight through the non-repeating pattern of holes, and conveying a message using semaphoric language.
• The Lattice Cubes, each formed of forty-eight irregular tetrahedrons. These tetroids come together to form a rational working system, composed of pieces that can theoretically expand into infinity. The work alludes to the theory of the universe expanding from a single radiant point.