The Nervous System (Umbilical), 2023. Artwork Render by Richard Forbes-Hamilton © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Conrad Shawcross doesn’t so much make works about mathematics and science – though he is certainly informed by those disciplines – so much as approach his artistic investigations in a comparable manner, experimenting with concepts, and building on the results in depth over many years as he pursues particular streams of thought. That leads him in ambitious directions that keep his support team busy in a purpose-converted, heavily-equipped former stables in Clapton – a now-desirable part of East London that, he says, had a reputation as a ‘murder mile’ when he moved there in 2005. Here we focus on three long-running aspects of his practise: rope-making machines; the combination of time, light, and shadow; and his use of the tetrahedron.

Shawcross made his first rope machines – solo – in 2003, just after leaving the Slade. They were of oak, requiring him to master complex joinery, and he recalls still working on them two hours before his first opening at the Entwistle Gallery! They always seemed on the edge of breaking down, he adds, giving them a perilousness suited to the ongoing series title ‘The Nervous Systems’. ‘Yet they did miraculously make rope’. Shawcross soon moved away from wood: ‘I didn’t want that Heath Robinson nostalgia, I wanted them to have the authority of a machine, that cold, empirical aesthetic – yet, beyond that, a metaphysical heart … a kind of tragedy, failure, irrationality, poetry to them. As if they are artworks in disguise.’

*Chord*, 2009. Aluminium, steel, mechanical system, multicoloured anorak cord. Dimensions variable © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photography by Alex Delfanne.

Chord, 2009, a related site-specific work and event, took place in the Kingsway Tram Subway in Holborn – a vast underground tunnel (closed for public use since 1952) that’s a survivor of London’s tram heritage. Shawcross loves responding to spaces, and made the most of the long subway by building two identical rope machines that wove a thick hawser from 324 spools of coloured string. They began back-to-back and then gradually moved away from each other following the old tram tracks. ‘Like two huge spiders’, says Shawcross, they slowly wove their rope behind them as they inched through the space over the course of an exhibition that caught the public imagination. ‘All the strings start off in parallel, and then it turns, and gradually this focal point emerges through these coloured cords and you get this tension, an hourglass moment when everything comes together.’ As in the smaller rope systems, there is an underlying concern with the human perception of time, as both a linear and cyclical notion. ‘The rope becomes a strong structural metaphor’, he says, ‘as it is a clear linear entity made up and formed by a cyclical process. Duration becomes interchangeable with length; and time with space - an hour being around twenty centimetres, a day around six metres’. Chord is still in storage in Sussex: Shawcross is unsure what to do with it, but muses on whether he could show it in a smaller space by ‘turning into a piece using elastic, so it goes back and forth to form a sort of cat’s cradle – constantly doing and undoing itself, rather than weaving as it did.’

Shawcross’s most ambitious current project – the most ambitious he will ever make, he says – also weaves rope. Commissioned by David Walsh for his museum in Tasmania, it will require a 12 x 12 x 12 metre space, making it ‘no easy feat to put it up. It’s gone on for over a decade, and most of the engineers who worked on it have moved on – only my structural engineer Peter Laidler, with me 25 years, has the retained knowledge needed’. Just now Shawcross is looking for a big space to test it in. Perhaps a museum director will read this …

*The Nervous System (Umbilical)*, 2023. Artwork Render by Richard Forbes-Hamilton © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

The Nervous Systems (Umbilical) employs an irrational – non-repeating – system, whereas all the other rope machines were rational. That’s because ‘the three arms are of different lengths, and all the gearing is aperiodic, so there’s no common denominator in the machine. If you try to follow one of the spools, it won’t go where you think it will … And so the machine will never come back to the initial conditions of the starting point.’ The rope will come down as a cone, and if you cut a cross-section, ‘it will be unique. It’s designed to have the string replaced each year, so it will run out after exactly twelve months, so there’s this moment when you replace the spools annually. In theory it can run 24/7 for ever, but in 10, 20, 30 years you could extrapolate the exact moment that a cross-section represents – a bit like an ice core, it will be a unique moment in time.’ Meanwhile, ‘the rope will build up, accruing into a soft play area, almost, of organic fireproofed wool.’

The Nervous Systems (Umbilical) runs counter to the usual purpose of a machine: to make things faster than a human can. Rather, it will makes its product so incrementally slowly that a human would be much quicker. That takes it into metaphysical territory: all that rational intent, cost and complexity to an end that makes no sense. Yet the engineering is challenging, not whimsical: at the centre is a huge rose gear with three pinions that come off at different angles. The teeth have been carved uniquely for each of the three arms that come off of the primary arm. The specialist gear company Shawcross uses say they have never seen anything like it. The title, he explains, picks up on how ‘it is a system making reference to the body, with two hemispheres coming into one rope, but a system that is nervous – vulnerable – with a sense of fragility’. One might think of a planetarium, but Shawcross also points to a climate model, given the chaotic aspect, and talks of Roger Penrose’s view of the universe as a space-time diagram culminating in a single point from which everything emerges. Shawcross is reminded of how ‘when I was a kid there was that pervading view that the world was bigger than all of us, and we would never really be able to impact on our environment because it was so vast – and now there is this increasing alarm and terror that we’re actually changing it so quickly and are much more vulnerable than we’d imagined’. That sense of a complex system on the edge of collapse seems very relevant now, but he thinks it will be interesting to see – given the planned permanence of the machine – how different generations respond to it.

*Timepiece*, 2013. Aluminium, steel, mechanical system, lights. Dimensions variable © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo by Stephen White.

Four years on from Chord, 2013’s Timepiece was just as site-specific, the springboard being that the Camden Roundhouse has 24 iron columns ranged around its space. That may be arbitrary, but, as Shawcross explains, so is the convention of 24 hours in a day: contrast how the moon defines the month, or the earth’s rotation defines the year. ‘The clock is one of the most successful systemic exports, almost tyrannical. The French famously tried for ten years to move to a ten hour system, but no one could get their head around it.’ Such thoughts inspired Shawcross to make a mechanical light sculpture that acted as a sundial-of-sorts, responding to the circular architecture in a dramatic display of light and shadow. The piece, says Shawcross, ‘is about turning this very odd clock into a celestial experience again, remembering how everyone once told the time through the length and position of shadows. It’s a clock with hours, minutes and seconds, and they all have these secondary and tertiary arms that move in and out, creating these elongating and shifting shadows that move at different speeds through the seconds, minutes and hours. So you can learn to tell the time from the shadows.’ In the Roundhouse, at least, hours were as celestially justified as days. At the same time, it’s hard not to think of Plato’s use of shadows as a metaphor for the human condition.

Timepiece was something of an exception in that Shawcross says he had until recently made many works full of light in which ‘the shadows were an incidental by-product’. Then he saw ‘a quote from Dorothy Hodgkin, who pioneered crystal radiography, saying that modelling pig insulin was equivalent to trying to work out the structure of a tree by seeing only its shadow. That implies you’ll never really work everything out – the shadow of reality won’t allow you to detect, for example, details of the bark, or the insects hosted. And that’s what artists are trying to do: find ingenious ways to see beyond our perception envelope. We build up a picture of the world, and smugly think we’re grasping reality, but historically it has always been revealed to be misguided. The next generation will undermine it by a paradigm shift. Consider what we know about black holes now compared with even ten years ago … As a child you have the illusion that your senses are complete, but art challenges that, underlining how limited our perception is, and that helps us understand the world better. It excites me to show things are precarious, and aren’t what they seem’. The Slow Arc Inside a Cube series pursues that purposeful use of shadows as an analogy for how we interpret the world: a small bright halogen light, on the end of an articulated arm, travels diagonally from one corner of a metal mesh cube to its opposite side, causing the fixed cage to project an intricately changing shadow onto the surrounding walls.

That notion of the paradigm shift comes from Thomas Kuhn’s characterisation of the fundamental changes in approach that jolt scientific enquiry forwards and collapse pre-existing notions of what is true. It takes us to the Paradigm series, in which Shawcross uses the tetrahedron as a non-repeating building block – as in the permanent installation commissioned by the Francis Crick Institute in King’s Cross. Paradigm, 2016, is a twisting, turning stack of tetrahedral steel blocks that increase in size by 10% every twist. At 14m high, it’s one of London’s tallest public sculptures – tall enough, indeed, to be the maximum size the form will take before reaching the collapsing stage of Kuhn’s cycle.

*Paradigm*, 2016. Francis Crick Institute, London. Permanent installation © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo by Marc Wilmot.

Shawcross’ interest in tetrahedrons is long-standing. As the simplest of the platonic solids, it is conceptually the symbol of an indivisible unit of matter. It’s also ‘an interesting shape’, says Shawcross, ‘made of four equilateral triangles you put together to make a three-sided pyramid – at first looks it looks very simple but is hugely complicated in its implications. It has a sense of order and rationality, but added together it has this property that it doesn’t tessellate with itself’. Unruly shapes result, and twenty of them put together always form a dystopic crack. Shawcross likes how people can read different things into that: does it prove or disprove that there’s a god? Or that we are or are not living in a simulation? We all bring their own culture, sexuality, love, and trauma to what Shawcross calls his ‘psychogeometry’ – as coined by Maria Montessori in the 1920’s when she came up with her system of teaching children through patterns, systems and progressions.

Shadows and tetrahedrons come together strikingly in the 30 tonnes of The Dappled Light of the Sun, first shown outside the Royal Academy of Arts in 2015, now on view in Oxford. An overarching canopy of five cloud-like forms – made up of 8,000 conjoined steel tetrahedrons – cast dappled shadows across the courtyard, generating chaos and beauty out of order and geometry. And the Fracture series takes the tetrahedron in a more ethereal direction: a twisting helical stem supports a series of branches which in turn support hundreds of fragments that, as a whole, echo the once-solid surface of the Paradigm skin. Shawcross says that ‘a potential way to think of them is as some sort of complex model by a scientist or a mathematician. While they appear to be functional or of rational intent, their meaning remains elusive. They contain a temporal element that seems to convey growth, entropy or collapse. On one side they could represent a complex chemical such as a protein chain or amino acid, but to complicate this interpretation, a strong sense of the passage of time runs through the form. They perhaps capture an instant after an explosion but before the collapse of the system that they chart.’

*Schism (Château La Coste)*, 2020. Weathered Steel, 650 x 650 x 650 cm, 255 7/8 x 255 7/8 x 255 7/8 in © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo by Rachel Taylor.

The Schism series is the clearest demonstration of the non-tessellation of the tetrahedron, combining twenty and showing how they don’t fit. The most monumental of those is the seven metre high Schism (Château La Coste), 2020. Shawcross built it during lockdown, having obtained a work travel permit, ‘with the help of out-of-work Argentinian pizza chefs and a mechanical digger’. The twist is that it uses only 19 tetrahedrons, the missing one allowing visitors to walk in and experience the psychogeometry from the inside. That’s a powerful experience –but we don’t need to be inside Shawcross’s sculptures to feel the dramatic and distinctive ways in which his investigations of our conceptual frameworks point to our limitations and possibilities.

Conrad Shawcross is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery. Extensive information can be found via his link tree. Oxford Mathematics is hosting (to 30 June) an exhibition, Cascading Principles: Expansions within Geometry, Philosophy, and Interference, bringing together some 40 sculptures by Shawcross with an emphasis on the tetrahedron, including the Paradigms, the Lattice Cubes, the Fractures, the Schisms, and The Dappled Light of the Sun. Online, you can see connected discussions in which Shawcross explores his themes with scientists, mathematicians and the show’s curator, Fatoş Üstek. From May to August 2024, Glyndebourne will be presenting an ambitious solo exhibition of Shawcross’ work, as part of their summer festival programme.

CONRAD SHAWCROSS: ART IN THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE