Catalyst

Gabrielle Hoad | The Luminous Envelope | Digital photograph | 2015

I have some work featured in a new online exhibition Catalyst, due to launch on Earth Day (Thursday 22nd April). It's been organised by Exeter University's Arts & Culture team working with the Environment & Sustainability Institute (ESI) and Cornwall-based curator Claire English. The exhibition reflects on 12 past collaborations between academics from the ESI and artists, and will feature artworks which have been developed by those artists since.

Given that the exhibition is wholly digital, I chose to feature images from The Luminous Envelope, which have been printed in physical form but exist equally happily as pixels on a screen. These photographs were made in response to a collection of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. They relate to my ongoing interest in the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that assists prediction or understanding. This theme was originally explored during my collaboration Foreign Soil with Dr Jonathan Bennie at the ESI in 2014. 

For Foreign Soil, we undertook a study of microclimates in southwest England to assess the feasibility of growing bananas – now or in a future climate scenario. Our inquiry, which focused on a particular south-facing pasture, included both digital climate modelling and practical fieldwork, and highlighted the inevitable disconnect between speculative microclimate models and specific day-to-day weather data.

The Luminous Envelope responds to a similar disconnect, this time between the ‘purity’ of mathematical equations and an attempt to make them tangible through physical model-making in plaster of Paris. In both cases, models (whether made of pixels or plaster) emerge as useful, but imperfect, representations.

Foreign Soil was developed with support from Exeter University’s Creative Exchange programme. The Luminous Envelope was commissioned by Metron in collaboration with Oxford University Mathematical Institute.