Sprawled on a bean bag, you gaze upwards into the maw of a machine far above. Spools of coloured threads have been grouped in constellation-like clusters. They circulate very slowly on mechanical arms. A background motor throbs. Strands, gradually unwinding, are drawn down, all but imperceptibly. They twine, plait and thicken, degree by infinitesimal degree, before feeding into some cog-driven mechanism and emerging in a bright heap of lumpy rope on the concrete floor.
To sit there and watch is mesmerising. But however relaxing it is, the experience (as an essay-length wall text might indicate) is about something more. This monumental artwork — The Nervous System (Umbilical) — is the latest in a series of seven “rope machines” that have been dreamt up and constructed by Conrad Shawcross over the course of his 25-year career.
Shawcross is a sculptor who operates at the interface of science and aesthetics. Mathematics and metaphysics, geometry and philosophy, mechanics and myth all merge in his work. For all that his confections are visually alluring, their appeal also lies in their intellectual complexity.
This monumental artwork is the latest in a series of Shawcross’s seven “rope machines”
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Before I meet the artist a friend tells me that an ordinary chat with Shawcross “can easily end up in stuff like black holes or wormholes or string theory”. It’s enough to push most minds beyond everyday limits. But then limits are what Shawcross resists. How can we access what lies beyond our immediate perception? That’s what fascinates him. “There’s a really fine line,” Shawcross says, “between having a hunch and madness and empirical research.”
I meet him beneath his mad spinning-wheel contraption, which is on display at Here East, in the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London. “I’m trying to represent things we can’t see,” he explains. “As children we learn to walk, to master gravity, to understand the way the world works, and we have this illusion that our perceptions are complete. The thrill of science is that it challenges these constructed realities, makes us realise how illusionary it all is.”
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What all his artworks have in common, he says — whether a colossal machine installed in a disused tram tunnel or a little bronze polygon that you can hold in your palm — is that they “set out to question our sense of reality, to represent things that we’ll never be able to comprehend”.
Shawcross was brought up in an intellectual milieu (his father, William Shawcross, and his mother, Marina Warner, are prominent writers). He studied first at the Ruskin School of Art, where he spent as much time in lectures as he did in the studio. Then he completed a master’s at the Slade, when he found himself as frequently in the science museum as an art gallery. “I met all my heroes there,” he says, “Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace …”
His earliest rope machine, Yarn (one of two other rope sculptures also on display at Here East), was the artwork that introduced Shawcross to a wider public when it was shown at the prestigious New Contemporaries exhibition in 2001. But Umbilical, he says, the latest and possibly the last (“or at least the last for a while”) of the rope series, is his most ambitious.
He first came up with the idea for it over a dinner with David Walsh, “a brilliant but eccentric number cruncher”, as Shawcross describes him, who having made a fortune by developing a bookie-beating gambling system, founded the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Umbilical will eventually have its permanent home there.
Walsh had been planning to buy one of the earlier rope machines. “But then,” Shawcross remembers, perhaps a little ruefully, “after a few too many glasses of wine I said: ‘What if I made a machine in which all the arms are different lengths and all the spools are different sizes, and all the gearing has no common denominator, so it never repeats?’”
“I want that one,” was Walsh’s answer, by which time Shawcross realised it was too late to go back. The rope machine which Walsh had initially wanted to purchase went into storage. It has not seen the light of day since, Shawcross says. Instead he found himself embarking on what he describes as a “ten-year odyssey, an epic quest” to make something that even Walsh, the man who was funding it, believed would be impossible. “He was like Zeus looking down upon me, a mere mortal, as I struggled with his challenge,” Shawcross says.
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Shawcross is emphatically hands-on. “Pointing your finger and asking people to do things for me doesn’t make me happy. I like to be at the coalface. Doing the heavy lifting and working out the logistics is all part of it for me.”
He and a tiny gang — all but two of the original team jumped ship when Walsh’s funding eventually ran out (Shawcross funded the rest himself) — fabricated the entire 10m-high structure with its 135 spools on their proliferating network of mechanical arms. “We got our scissor-lift licence so that we could assemble it. Even my cleaning lady, Marico, got trained as a rigger. It took 45 trailer loads of stuff towed behind my family car to deliver everything to this spot,” Shawcross says. Though fortunately, he adds, Here East is only a ten-minute journey from Clapton in east London, where he lives above his studio with his wife (Carolina Mazzolari, also an artist, who works with weaving too), his two stepchildren and his 11-year-old son.
All Shawcross’s rope pieces set out to explore our perceptions about time. “I think of the spools as being like planets; where the ropes come together is the present and the rope itself is the past,” he explains. “But Umbilical pushes things further than ever before in terms of complexity.” Where its predecessors operated to a predictable pattern, this latest machine is inherently chaotic.
It can be hard to stop Shawcross once he embarks on an explanation. His brain overspills with ideas. His work also features in a group show, Quantum Untangled, which opens at Science Gallery London today and touches upon false vacuum decay and steady state theory, among other things. He moves on to explain the concept of apophenia: the human tendency to find connections and patterns that in reality do not exist.
Our descriptions of the universe are apophenic, apparently. “We have spent 3,000 years or more trying to work out the architecture of our solar system, to discover the grand design, the mechanism behind all of this movement,” Shawcross says. “We think of our solar system, with its nine planets and 891 moons, as repetitive and regular. We define our sense of time by our rotation around the sun. We base our calendars on the number 360 because it’s so beautifully neat; you can slice and divide it so nicely. And in our desire to find a pattern, we prefer the order of mathematics instead of the messy truth.”
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The messy truth, Shawcross explains, is that our solar system was created by a series of catastrophic events. “The sun is not static. It is hurtling along at unimaginable speeds in a spiral galaxy made up of an ocean of other stars which is itself travelling at incomprehensible speeds towards a black hole. And the planets don’t realign at midnight and start again. They never come back to exactly the same point.”
This is “the innate chaos” that his latest rope machine sets out to reflect. “It started at a zero point when everything lined up in the same orientation. But nothing comes back to the same position. You can lie on the bean bag below it, staring up, and never see the same thing twice,” Shawcross says, before confessing that the mathematician Marcus de Sautoy rather threw him by contradicting his claim. Apparently the machine would repeat eventually — “but only in about two and a half billion years, by which time the sun will probably have consumed the earth,” Shawcross cheerfully declares.
In the meantime the machine continues — extremely slowly — to extrude its rope, its random patterns a record of time’s irregularities. “The clock is such a ubiquitous thing but the tick-tock of time could have been so different,” Shawcross says. “Artists who slow down clocks or melt clocks are not really dealing with time itself. They don’t really get to the heart of the problem which, whether you are a quantum physicist or a child, we can’t really understand.”
That’s why his sculptures, he insists, are not illustrative models. “My machines might look rational on one level but they have a poetic heart. The rope series is about the mystery of time. And time is one of the great mysteries of our life.” Which is why you should make time this month to go and watch the time pass.
Umbilical is at Here East, London (hereeast.com) to Nov 2; Quantum Untangled is at the Science Gallery London (london.sciencegallery.com) to Feb 28