Artist Conrad Shawcross finds beauty in machines. His mechanical sculptures - constructed from steel or wood and brought alive with motors, lights and cogs - pay homage to inventors, mathematicians and scientific pioneers.
His ongoing Ada Project (named after Ada Lovelace), for example, is a hacked welding robot that dances, creating mesmerising light patterns. Musicians live with the robot for a week, creating music in response to its choreographed movements. Timepiece explores celestial timekeeping, and his Paradigm series is based on the mathematics of tetrahedrons.
Shawcross's latest work is The Optic Cloak, a 49m-high structure on the 600,00m2 Greenwich peninsula in London. Debuting later this summer, it's actually a chimney flue, part of Greenwich's low-carbon energy centre, and coated in a new dynamic surface.
"My proposal was quite radical in that it removed the entire frame surrounding the chimney and replaced it with a much lighter, more efficient one," explains the 38-year-old. "It has a triangulated structure with perforated panels, forming a translucent skin that allows the wind to pass through it."
Looking at ways of visually breaking up a flat surface, Shawcross took inspiration from camouflage and a mathematical optical phenomenon known as the moiré pattern. "The paradox of camouflage is that on one level it's trying to make something disappear, but on another it becomes arresting and visible." Shawcross experimented with old-fashioned techniques: folding paper as well as looking at the effects of angle, opacity and hole sizes. He also used digital modelling in Cinema 4D.
"London is littered with incredible, iconic chimneys and it's a real legacy of the city," says Shawcross. "It's still primarily a flue stack, but by using an interesting piece of design, it's hopefully a beautiful landmark on the horizon too." Kevin Holmes conradshawcross.com