Opening up The Luminous Envelope

Gabrielle Hoad | The Luminous Envelope | 2015

Last year I was invited by Exeter University's Arts & Culture team to reflect on work I had made as a result of working with the university's Environment & Sustainability Institute (ESI).  The work appeared in an online exhibition called Catalyst. 

I chose to feature images from The Luminous Envelope, a series of photographs I made in 2015 in response to a collection of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. They relate to my interest in the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that assists prediction or understanding, which began back in 2014 with the ESI-sponsored project Foreign Soil.

As a result of revisiting this work, and at the request of the university, I began to write about the work. Interalia magazine have kindly published the results in their 'Emerging ideas' section, where I reflect on the notion of 'boundary objects' and models as types of fiction. This writing is something of a work in progress, but it felt important to bring it to a concrete form, from which I could build future thinking and making.

https://www.interaliamag.org/emerging-ideas/gabrielle-hoad-the-luminous-envelope-visualising-the-invisible/