This exhibition – with its associated workshops, talks and events – explores how geometry is used by artists and astronomers, bio-chemists, engineers, surgeons, architects, physicists and mathematicians – among many others – as a means to understand, explain and order the world around us. It draws parallels between the artist’s studio, the laboratory and the study as equivalent places for thinking, imagining and creating.
Geometry takes us from an understanding of specific places to grappling with multi-dimensional spaces beyond our immediate experience. The word itself means to measure the earth. For Plato and Euclid, geometry was solid, fundamental and even sacred. Today geometry operates with uncertainties, fluid boundaries and variable parameters – addressing questions that, phrased slightly differently, artists have also concerned themselves with for centuries.
Over sixty contributors include artists Richard Deacon, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Robert Morris, David Nash, Keith Tyson and Conrad Shawcross. The exhibition also features Sir Christopher Wren’s dividers, virus-structure models produced by the Nobel winning biophysicist Professor Sir Aaron Klug, the conic ellipses of astronomer Robin Catchpole, and Professor Sir Roger Penrose’s geometrical explorations of the mathematical foundations of the universe.
Curated by Barry Phipps, Kettle’s Yard’s first Interdisciplinary Fellow, this exhibition is a follow-up to the highly successful ‘Lines of Enquiry’.
The exhibition is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.