Nadav Drukker

Artist statement

Simultaneously an artist and a scientist, these two facets of me get fused in my ceramics.

As a theoretical physicist I teach and research the deepest mysteries of the universe. As an artist, I create sculptural pieces whose purpose it to mirror the creativity of scientific pursuit in art. My works represent specific research projects with the forms and designs inspired by my research, from mathematical spaces, physical constructs to graphs of phase diagrams. The pieces are inscribed by words and formulas taken from my science. At times they are rough ideas and calculations and at others refined results of my research. The artistic language serves to exemplify the stage of research by using varied materials, from coarse stoneware to pure white porcelain and the decoration techniques span incision, inlay, cutting, oxides, glazing and gilding.

My research, within the topic of string theory, the most fundamental hypothetical theory of nature, is very abstract. It is studied by only a handful of specialists and my art aims to convey how science creates knowledge so the viewers need not decipher the formulas, rather they should be viewed as cuneiforms or hieroglyphs. I aspire to present the language of mathematics as beautiful and holding knowledge encouraging further exploration.

Social media contact details:
Instagram: @nadavdrukker
Twitter: @nadavdrukker
Facebook: @NadavDrukkerArt

Pieces:
Title: Threehalves-3
Date: 2020
Medium: Stoneware

Artist statement:
This series represents one of my most influential research papers, written with Marcos Mariño and Pavel Putrov. We study a theory in three dimensions on a sphere (like the series cut, but predating it). In mathematics we often generalize from real numbers to complex numbers, but sometimes this is not enough. The complex numbers are required in order to have a square root of negative numbers, but that does not account for the fact that every number has two square roots:

2*2=4 and also (-2)*(-2) = 4. To define the square root properly it is not enough to include the complex numbers, we need two copies of them, so if we distinguish between these two 4’s, one has a square root 2 and the other (-2). These two copies are intertwined along something known as a branch-cut. The solution of the problem we studied in our work involved complicated functions which have two branch cuts, hence the two cuts in the pots.

One of our main results is that a complicated function of two parameters λ and k and we found that for very large λ, it grows like λ^(3/2). This captures the number of degrees of freedom of the theory. In one limit it behaves like the λ^2 and in the other limit that we found, it’s the three-halves power. Our work was the first derivation of this behavior from first principles.

Price details: NFS

The work is as exhibited at the Viner Gallery for the NEWWAVE show.

Artist statement

The project represented in the “codimension” series studies the embedding of theories in different dimensions into one-another. The vases represent the construction of a two dimensional defect in four dimensions. Since I could not realize a four dimensional space in clay, I took the two dimensional surface and made a defect on it: the protrusion.

It is sometimes helpful to consider the difference in dimensions, or codimension, hence the name of the series. A codimension-one object on a pot would be a line and codimension-two would be a point, enlarged in this series to the cone. In some of the pot. The text has to somehow squeeze past the defect, representing how a codimension- two object would effect its vicinity.

Price details: £600

Promotional image.

Artist statement

A common way to describe surfaces in mathematics is by cutting them into basic constituents which are “pairs of pants”. There is an infinite different ways of cutting a (complicated enough) surface into pairs of pants. The question I studied with D. Morrison and T. Okuda is related to curves on the surfaces and how they look like in different pants decompositions. This classification was done independently by two famous mathematicians: Dehn and Thurston, whose results we rely on.

Gaiotto found that different descriptions of the same physical theory and different pants decompositions. We studied the physical analog of the curves and found a precise physics analog of the classification of Dehn and Thurston, which was very cool. The cutting and sewing of the pairs of pants (and the curve on the surface) are clearly realized in the ceramic works.
This piece realizes three possible “pants decompositions” of the torus with one puncture. The torus is the doughnut and the puncture is represented by the leg.

Price details: £950 for triptych

The work is as exhibited at the Viner Gallery for the NEWWAVE show.

Promotional image.