Title: Harmonic Drawing (Chromatic)

Year: 2024

Media: Ink on Paper, Print, Ed of 50

Size: 42 x 41 cm

About the work: The Harmonic Drawing is produced using an harmonograph; a now defunct, Victorian-era machine that traditionally uses swinging pendulums to draw visualisations of movement. Shawcross has adapted a harmonograph with two pendulums - one attached to a pen, the other to paper - and feed the device with a musical chord, making the pendulums move in tandem, which then applies marks to the paper. In this way Shawcross has attempted to render musical movements on a flat plane.

Bio: Imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality, Conrad Shawcross’ RA (b. 1977) often monumental sculptures explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics and metaphysics.  

Inspired by different technologies, the artist's structures may retain in appearance the authority of machines – yet their raison d’être remains elusive, filled with paradox and wonder. Some have a melancholy feel, while others tend to the sublime, substituting the purely functional for phenomenological experience.