Ian Andrews – NEWWAVE Art

Portrait of a proton

Ink

2020

Works

1. Wall piece (shown in the background of this image)

“Portrait of a proton”
2020

Ink on separate sheets of Arches paper with mapping pins and magnets.
£1000

Artist statement

The Sketchbook and the Collider

The sketchbook and the Collider is an on-going collaboration with Prof Kostas Nikolopoulos from the particle physics group at University Birmingham and evolves from my residency at the University in 2018 culminating in the exhibition “The sketchbook and the Collider,” at the University and subsequent Arts Council funded exhibition at the Library of Birmingham entitled “Collision Event” in 2019.

In discussion with Prof. Nikolopoulos it became clear that despite obvious differences our specialisms of fine art and particle physics are both concerned with making the invisible visible. Scientific developments have seen the “everyday” dissolve into sub-atomic interactions only accessible by examining traces left in an enabling medium in a detector. A process mirrored by the artist expressing ideas and emotions through marks made and materials manipulated. Taking the same journey from something hidden to something revealed.

Indeed the physicist’s relationship to their detectors has striking parallels with the relationship of the artist to their media and methods. In 1989 physicist Carlo Rubbia stated that detectors are how physicists express themselves just as painters use painting and sculptors sculpture.

Initially we compared the material cultures surrounding our two disciplines and focused on a piece of essential equipment in each case, the sketchbook and the most advanced form of detector; the particle collider. We felt that both are connected as arenas where different elements are brought together, sometimes violently involving “active processes” that create and examine the visible traces of hidden interactions to determine if something significant has happened to change the way we understand the world around us.

Referring to Paul Klee’s Bauhaus lecture notes published as “The thinking Eye” and Wassily Kandinsky’s “Point and line to plane” I decided to expose the mechanics of making a drawing in the same way that Prof. Nikolopoulos was revealing elemental particles and I sought to establish equivalents between the particle characteristics of spin, mass and charge and the graphic elements of point, line and shape.

This creates an intimate visual and conceptual connection between my visual language, the fundamental artistic activity and the interaction of elemental particles that create the universe.

Physicist Carlo Ravelli states that the quantum world describes things not as they are, but as they occur and interact, a world not of objects but of events. Drawing is a process that is best suited to capturing the ephemeral and elements in flux and therefore a perfect vehicle for exploring the particles as they decay and interact, sometimes existing for a fleeting moment before changing again or annihilating in a collision.

Ian Andrews MA RCA
http://thesketchbookandthecollider.com/
07951 054 433