Mathematica
by Bridie Lonie
DIGITAL MOSAICS, by Sara Hughes; THE SPRING TUNE, by Lionel Bawden, Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Symmetry, asymmetry and pattern recognition are areas where art and science often like to feel that they meet and/or compete. Each partner in this rather awkward relationship feels that the other is, to some extent, an idiot. Artists are irrational and inexact; scientists are fundamentalists. But contemporary concerns from both ends about indeterminacy – the art of not being sure – suggest that there are more shared territories than there used to be.
Two recent exhibitions – Digital Mosaics by Sara Hughes, the Frances Hodgkins Fellow, and the spring tune by Lionel Bawden – demonstrated art’s current interest in pattern. Biochemists, mathematicians and makers of patchwork quilts know that there are 17 different ways to construct a surface design. Mathematicians and physicists also know that somewhere down among the minute subatomic particles some strange asymmetry was respons-ible for the creation of the universe. So there are formal and metaphysical reasons for people’s interest in pattern.
Likewise, contemporary theorists concerned with the ways societies work, not to mention economics, know that strange effects occur when you get huge numbers of small details. In each of these areas, recognising a pattern where there doesn’t appear to be one is a relevant and demanding skill.
Coming to Dunedin as Frances Hodgkins Fellow, Hughes took the opportunity of the year-long immersion in academic life to research the patterns that are the basis of digital design: the sorts of shapes and virtual spaces that are constructed of myriads of single units. She bought a cutter attached to a computer and began to generate shapes on hand-coloured Mylar. The work was obsessive and exacting, as she stuck the tiny hand-painted cut-outs onto walls, canvas and light-boxes.
During the year she exhibited a series that celebrated the work of the now-celebrated Ada Lovelace whose mathematics were so useful to Babbage, the creator of the adding machine. Connections between the punchcards used in the textile industry to make paisley shawls that spread throughout the orientalist world were referenced as she scattered day-glo paisley forms over the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s wall. That would have been enough for a Hodgkins fellowship in itself, but Hughes was also interested in the more fundamental issues of pattern-making; in this final exhibition, she fills the gallery with samplers of symmetry and asymmetry drawn from the wide range of artists who have played with the grid and its dissolutions.
Their brightly coloured luminosity also relies upon relationships between pattern and colour (the intellect/emotion spectrum of visual languages). These bright works are deliberate eye candy. One of the largest pieces, “Hacker”, is a lateral grid of dots whose resolution is consistently impeded by the colours Hughes has chosen. The work buzzes with subliminal codes, numbers, the diagrams used by optometrists to discover colour blindness. But none appear in focus. In fact, none of them exist. It’s just that our eyes always act to make sense of what we see.
Hughes references Islamic mosaics, patchwork quilts, op-pop artists Viktor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, high modernists Joseph Albers and Frank Stella, and the hi-art lite protagonist Damien Hirst. Science enters, too, not simply in her use of maths. She has covered a floor in small tiles, principally in deep colours with a low reflective capacity (as the paint charts would tell us). Standing in this room, diagonals appear at the edge of peripheral vision, but disappear as you move to their centre.
At the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Lionel Bawden glued together three-dimensional mosaics of thousands of pencils donated by a delighted pencil manufacturer, then cut them into shapes or sanded them back into deep planar surfaces with each pencil’s glowing core ringed by the nimbus of its painted surface. Like Hughes, he referenced the “low” art form of patchworks’s boxed patterns.
Western Europe’s mathematical knowledge depends enormously upon Islamic maths. That iconoclastic culture rejects the seductions of the representational. But it scarcely sees decorative arts as meaningless; instead symmetry itself is seen as representational, hence the need to flaw a design in order not to replicate the work of the Almighty, a fact all carpet buyers know. Artists – like everyone else today – want to understand Islamic thought.
