Conrad Shawcross
Space Trumpet, 2005
Birch ply, copper brackets, rivets washers , varnish
8.5 m x 5m x 5m
from: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/events/lectures/lectures.htm
6.30pm Wednesday 16 January 2008
Darwin Lecture Theatre, UCL
Gower Street
London WC1
CONRAD SHAWCROSS
Selected for the annual New Contemporaries show while barely out of college, Conrad Shawcross is in the vanguard of British art. His sculptures are Heath Robinson machines, large, complex structures that fuse science with art. With his early work snapped up by the Saatchi Gallery, international shows and public commissions are lining up well into the future.
Often using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross’s structural and often mechanical sculptures, question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitious within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his often complex mechanised systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a ‘rasion d’etre’. From early works such as The Nervous System, 2002 – a monumental spinning machine that endlessly weaves a length of coloured rope into the form of a double helix, the shape of DNA – to his recent giant spiral work Continuum, 2004, the artist has attempted to visualize, among other things, the incomprehensible of human concerns, time.
Conrad Shawcross
Binary Star, 2006
mixed media
dimensions variable
