Looking back: Working with mathematical surfaces (2012- )

The Luminous Envelope #3 (Unravelled octahedron) | 2015 | Digital photograph 59.4 x 84.1 cm

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Although I find advanced mathematics utterly bewildering, I notice there is a common thread in a lot of my digital work that relates to surfaces. I don’t mean surfaces in the usual artistic sense of touch and texture but abstract entities of infinite scale (but no volume) described by points and lines. Mathematicians talk about them using symbols and numbers and, more recently, model and view them using 3D visualisation software.

My first encounter with mathematical surfaces was when I tried to use 3-D printing (laser sintering) to create objects from GPS flight data generated by gliders and birds. It’s relatively easy to plot successive points in space in a computer program and to link them into a screen-based ‘surface’ that you can manipulate in virtual space, but turning those points into a scaled, real-world object with physical volume is a whole other matter.

I encountered a similar issue when in 2015 I was invited to work with a range of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. These rendered mathematical formulae as plaster models (ie represented abstract entities as tangible objects you could sit on a shelf). I was particularly fascinated by the claim that such objects were locked away in the 1940s "to protect students from the dangers of intuition". In fact, the constant refrain from Professor Sam Howison, who patiently guided a group of artists through engagement with the collection, was that we were dealing with “surfaces not solids”, even as we held the heavy plaster objects in our hands.

The image above shows one of the photographs I made in response to a model of Fresnel's Wave Surface. The original model represents light waves emanating from a crystal as a solid object. The photographs make use of polarisation to dissolve sculptural objects into zones of colour. (Polarisation, incidentally, is a technique frequently used in the study of crystals.)  It was commissioned by Metron in collaboration with Oxford University Mathematical Institute and shown as part of ‘Illegitimate Objects’ at Oxford University Mathematical Institute (2015).

In this context of things that (imperfectly) co-exist in the infinite abstract and bounded physical realms, I was fascinated to be introduced last year to the myth of Skidbladnir by Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer. Skidbladnir was the ship of the Norse gods, which was so large that it could hold on board all the gods with all their weapons, arms, and horses, yet could be folded up and put in a pocket like a handkerchief (or possibly, I considered, a memory stick).

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Looking back: Interloper (2014)

Interloper | 2014 | 12-page publication + large-scale print on vinyl banner (175 x 84cm)

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Interloper, made for Oxford Botanic Garden in 2014, was a particular turning point for me. For this project, Senior Curator Alison Foster drew articles from Oxford University’s archive of the Gardeners’ Chronicle, which were then randomly matched with participating artists.

My article, from 1841, was on bud grafting, a process often used by fruit growers to propagate different varieties and species on others. Although the processes by which the mixed plant materials co-exist are now largely understood, the phenomenon used to provoke both curiosity and anxiety. The way grafting challenges the boundaries of living things led me to Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010).

In seeking antique images of grafting, I stumbled across a beautiful 1660 tome called The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature by Robert Sharrock. Sharrock carried out many practical trials into grafting and, in a neat twist, it turned out many of them had taken place in Oxford Physick Garden, the site on which I was now working.

Interloper examines the perceived divide between natural and cultural, traditional and technological through images of strange conjunctions. (The title itself is a hybrid word, bringing together Latin and Middle Dutch.)

My work, which was placed in the garden’s orangery alongside grafted fruit trees, consisted of an image on a large vinyl banner (a material chosen to withstand the garden’s watering regime), and was accompanied by an artist publication. In making the publication, the usual process of imposition, which rearranges spreads for printing and binding, was bypassed. Instead the reader has to disassemble the pages (mentally or literally) in order to obtain complete images.

Commissioned by Metron for 'the breaking of tulips' at Oxford Botanic Garden, the publication also appeared at 'Counter 2014', Plymouth Arts Centre with MCMXCII Projects, and as part of 'The Floating Library 2015', Silver Lake, St Anthony, Minnesota.

Photo: Kevin Burrell

Looking back: The archivists walk... (2018)

breaking the fall | 2018 | Cropped still from 3-minute digital video

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. breaking the fall and The archivists walk over the beautiful debris of our broken flowers are two related works with a tangled collaborative history.

The three-minute video, breaking the fall was made with Megan Calver as a postscript to her wider research project with Sarah Bennett and Philippa Lawrence: Disclosures & Dialogues. This considered possible futures for Hestercombe House in Somerset in discussion with artists, writers, curators, historians, architects, archivists and horticulturists.  In relation to ideas of conservation, Megan invited participants (including me) to experience what it felt like to let things go by dropping flowers down an 8.5-metre stairwell at the property. 

She and I later recreated this action to document it for the Hestercombe archive, adding an extra action Megan wanted to explore of trying to catch the blooms. We also filmed ourselves measuring the drop, which we included in the finished film as it added a further thought about how we might best attend to and care for our heritage.

The text work is my personal contribution to the Hestercombe archive and a coda to our actions. The stairwell we used was by the entrance to the archive office. In coming and going during the day of filming, one of the archivists had to pick his way across the flowers we’d left lying. I liked the idea that archivists might try to step carefully around, but might also inadvertently trample on, what history leaves behind.

The archivists walk… | 2018 | Digitally printed text, Epson ink on Tetenal paper 

Looking back: Fatal exchanges (2017)

Fatal exchanges (detail) | 2017 | Site-responsive installation, plus 12-page publication

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Fatal exchanges, made with Megan Calver in 2017, seems especially appropriate as it focuses on the effects of a virus.

Drawing on a text, Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B Toklas, the work examines a network of deaths resulting from instinct, accident, pleasure and necessity. Created during a group residency on the Cotley Estate in Somerset, it was inspired by an event in 1832 when the hounds of the Cotley Hunt were struck by the rabies virus and the Master of the Hunt had to shoot all but one of them.

A lot of people approached the work assuming it was vehemently pro- or anti-hunting but our stance was one of curiosity. We set aside our own abhorrence of blood-sports to try to understand the relationship that the Cotley estate owners and their staff had with fox-hunting. Ultimately, we were able to place hunting in the wider context of land management; not apologising for it but trying to think dispassionately about what humans and non-humans do, not only to survive, but in the pursuit of pleasure. It should be noted the estate now imports fox urine from the US for drag hunting, but memories of the original ‘sport’ live on.

We built our installation out of found objects from the site. At its heart was a  magpie trap, acting as a plinth for a sad old taxidermy fox with bare-boned feet and a stick-like brush. We were told he was about 100 years old; he was also alive with carpet beetles. The cycle of life and death continued.

Looking back: Lark, stone (2016)

Lark, stone still | 2016 | Action to camera 

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Lark, stone was a short action to camera made at Dawlish Warren, Devon, with Megan Calver and Susie David.

The simple gesture of turning a flint in the hand conjured up the song of a skylark, which appeared to coordinate its actions with mine: the weight and inertness of the stone contrasting with the bird’s energetic movements and song. On reviewing the video footage, we discovered that the stone also sings, squeaking gently as it is turned in the hand.

Part of a collaborative inquiry into the possibilities of live experimentation, supported by a bursary from a-n The Artist Information Company. Shown as part of ‘Throw only to an alert catcher’ (2016).

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Lichening

Hide #5 (Lichening) | Digital photograph | 2020

“To be one at all you must be a many – and that’s not a metaphor.” Donna Haraway*

This is the latest in a series of experimental photographs concerned with the idea of the hide – a camouflaged structure that seeks to efface the presence of the observer and encourage 'natural' behaviour in those observed. I am interested in the hide as a means of surreptitiously entering the territory of another, but also in the hide as skin, a notional boundary between self and the world.  

When Haraway says you must be a many, she is referring to the way we are intimately connected with other things, that our bodies are not singular things but whole ecosystems. I am particularly interested in the lichens in this image, which are a symbiosis (a mutually beneficial relationship) between fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. As amalgams of multiple organisms working together, they make with. We are all created by multiple relationships. 

Hide #5 was made following an invitation from Gail Flockhart to respond to the theme 'Selfies together in isolation' as part of her PhD research at the University of Plymouth.

*Donna Haraway Anthropocence, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble (University of California, Santa Cruz, 9 May 2014) 

together / apart

Gabrielle Hoad | Orbit #2 | April 2020 | Polaroid processing by That Art Gallery, Bristol

After the forced closure of their physical space, That Art Gallery, Bristol launched an open call for photos taken during the Covid-19 pandemic. Selected photos were printed using their Polaroid Lab and displayed in the windows of the premises for the duration of lockdown. They were also shared on the gallery's Instagram feed. This is mine: one of a series of abandoned balls, snapped while I was out on a daily circular walk in my immediate neighbourhood.

together / apart, That Art Gallery, 2 Upper Maudlin Street, Bristol BS2 8DJ