elemental › Nick Turvey

Curved Glass
Solo exhibition

Museum of the History of Science

17th March – 17th May 2009

Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3AZ.
Tuesday – Friday 12.00 – 17.00 hrs.
Saturday & Sunday 10.00 – 17.00 hrs.

Image: Nothing Comes Into Being (detail)
SpinState
2008. Acrylic & stainless steel. 73 x 73 x 10 cm.
SpinState
2008. Acrylic & stainless steel. 73 x 73 x 10 cm.
Some Things Occur by Necessity
2007. Lead Crystal. 30 x 26 cm.
Glass has been intimately entangled with the development of scientific thinking, from the alembics of the alchemists to the instruments of Hooke and Galileo. Here, the medium and process of working with hot glass has been used as a plastic, polydimensional algebra, a cloud chamber of tracks and traces frozen in massive thicknesses that bend light like gravity.
Some Things Occur by Necessity
2007. Lead Crystal. 30 x 26 cm.
Glass has been intimately entangled with the development of scientific thinking, from the alembics of the alchemists to the instruments of Hooke and Galileo. Here, the medium and process of working with hot glass has been used as a plastic, polydimensional algebra, a cloud chamber of tracks and traces frozen in massive thicknesses that bend light like gravity.
Mister Mark
2007. Lead crystal. 20 x 19 cm.
“..And when mind began to set things in motion, there was separation from everything that was in motion, and however much mind set in motion, all this was made distinct. The rotation of the things that were moved and made distinct caused them to be yet more distinct.” Anaxagoras
Indivisible and Unchangeable
2007. Lead crystal. 30 cm x 20 x 20 cm.
“The Greeks do not rightly use the terms coming into being and perishing. For nothing comes into being nor yet does anything perish, but there is mixture and separation of things that are. So they would do right in calling the coming into being mixture, and the perishing separation.” Anaxagoras
Hidden Dimensions
2007. Lead crystal. 38 x 38 x 8 cm.

The perceptual disruption of highly refractive, transparent materials can thus be understood as an intrusion of non-Euclidean space into our seemingly stable everyday world of three co-ordinates, or alternatively as macro-scale, involute, extra dimensions, what a mathematician might call manifolds.
Hidden Dimensions
2007. Lead crystal. 38 x 38 x 8 cm.
The perceptual disruption of highly refractive, transparent materials can thus be understood as an intrusion of non-Euclidean space into our seemingly stable everyday world of three co-ordinates, or alternatively as macro-scale, involute, extra dimensions, what a mathematician might call manifolds.