Geometries (2005) acrylic paint, ripstop nylon, cold cathode tubes, Sylvester Space Gallery.
Geometrees (2005)
I failed maths at school. I remember asking my teacher what the point of trigonometry was — not as a provocation, but as a genuine question. Maths was taught as something abstract, disconnected from anything I could see or touch or make. It made no sense to me.
What I didn't know then was that I was dyslexic. The way numbers and symbols behaved on the page, the way abstract systems resisted me — these weren't signs of stupidity. They were signs that I needed a different way in.
Geometry turned out to be that way in. Not maths as it had been taught to me, but the geometry of the physical world — the way a sphere closes in on itself, the logic of a structure that holds its shape, the relationship between edge and face and volume that you can hold in your hands. Suddenly the mathematics I'd been told I couldn't do was something I understood through making.
Geometrees is a series of inflatable sculptures painted in acrylic directly onto ripstop nylon, exhibited at Sylvester Space Gallery in 2005. The forms are based on Platonic and geometric solids — the sphere, the icosahedron, structures borrowed from nature and mathematics alike. The paint becomes part of the form itself, not applied to it. Soft and breathing in the gallery space, these sculptures are geometric in conception and entirely physical in reality.
Dimensions range from 1000mm diameter to 500mm diameter.