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The magazine will feature exclusive interviews with artists, scientists, writers and creative thinkers.

The Language of Line

“The entry point to my mark making lies in my everyday experience. These marks I interpret as imaginary traces that reflect the fragility of both human and environmental interconnectedness. Although I constantly see traces around me, the experience of absorbing these traces is not so much a visual experience as it is a physical process. Seeing is more a cyclical slippage between the reception of absorbing external traces and the inner resonance I feel inside my body.”

Formally a cardiac nurse, artist Sonya Rademeyer uses the vehicle of sound, movement and deep listening to explore the sensing of traces in her everyday experiences and the fragility of line to capture and translate them into form.

Between drawing and writing

Kelly Chorpening is an artist, writer and educator. She has been the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL since 2006. Her recent experiments explore ways of materialising the form of language in order to test the fundamental processes of naming and identification that occur in both drawing and writing. She is currently co-editing, with Rebecca Fortnum, ‘A Companion to Contemporary Drawing’, containing newly commissioned essays on contemporary drawing, to be published in 2018.

A perspective on drawing

Richard Talbot is currently Head of Fine Art and Professor of Contemporary Drawing at Newcastle University. His work includes large-scale drawings, sculpture, and more recently, video/installation. His research and studio practice is centred on contemporary drawing, but he brings to this a particular interest in the theory, history and practice of perspective. His interest in drawing, and in particular his use of perspective, has developed out of originally making sculpture and finding that drawing and the investigation of line, plane and space, lay at the root of much of his theoretical and creative concerns. This in turn has led to an investigation into many areas of drawing practice – but in particular, the role that linear perspective plays in that practice.

Mediating between Nature and Self

Tania Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large-scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape. Her work was the subject of a major solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2014, encompassing sculptures and drawings which explored her preoccupation with the sea. She is Course Director, MA Drawing at UAL, Wimbledon and has recently been appointed Professor of Drawing at Bath Spa University. She is also the author of ‘Drawing Water’ (2014) and ‘The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing – The Primary Means of Expression’ (2017).

Reminders of a past

“The main focus of my work is the exploration of manmade forms, many of which have been gradually superseded, forgotten or abandoned. They were at the forefront of technology for their time but technology and purpose have left some of these structures behind and they have become architectural metaphors or reminders of a past. The work also looks at the idea of permanence and impermanence.”

Ian Chamberlain is a Senior Lecturer in MA Printmaking and Drawing and Print at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His work takes its influence from man-made structures. Reinterpreting them as monuments placed within the landscape, these objects in turn become landmarks of their time.

Material repetition

“I am looking at materiality and repeatedly putting it through the same process, so repetition is a key aspect of my vocabulary. By repeatedly putting something through the same process – or by repeating something and putting it in a different context – it becomes all too apparent that things can’t be repeated, that each one is totally unique and never the same.”

Lucinda Burgess’s background in painting, landscape design and oriental philosophy has led to a fascination with the raw elemental qualities of materials and inform a sculptural practice that accentuates the reality of constant change, undermining the idea of a fixed thing, object, entity or identity.

Random precision. Countless intimate acts.

Helen Pynor is an Australian visual artist who works at the intersection between art and the life sciences. She has degrees in both cell and molecular biology, and the visual arts, and holds a cross-disciplinary PhD from the Sydney College of Arts. She works with photography, video, sculpture and performance to explore ideas surrounding human and animal bodies, and disease. In this exclusive interview she discusses her collaborative project with Dr Iris Salecker at the Francis Crick Institute, London

On ‘Deconstructing Patterns: art and science in conversation’

In her role as Public Engagement Manager (Exhibitions) at the Francis Crick Institute, Bryony Benge-Abbott both curated and project managed ‘Deconstructing patterns’. She comes from an art and heritage background, having undertaken an undergraduate degree in Fine Art (Painting) at Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology at the University of East Anglia. Bryony joined the Crick early in 2016 to set up institute’s exhibition programme.

Thinking about Patterns

Ian Stewart is an Emeritus Mathematics Professor at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is author or coauthor of over 190 published research papers on pattern formation, chaos, network dynamics, and biomathematics. He has published over 120 books including ‘Does God Play Dice?’, ‘Nature’s Numbers’, ‘Why Beauty is Truth’, ‘Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities’, ’17 Equations that Changed the World’, ‘Infinity’, ‘Calculating the Cosmos’, and the four books of the bestselling ‘Science of Discworld’ series with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. He has five honorary degrees, and his awards include the Royal Society’s Faraday Medal, the IMA Gold Medal, the AAAS Public Understanding of Science Award, the LMS/IMA Zeeman Medal, the Lewis Thomas Prize, and the Euler Book Prize. He is an honorary wizard of Unseen University on Discworld. In this exclusive interview he discusses the mathematics behind patterns in Nature.