Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue
I鈥橫 A great lover of science. It鈥檚 a fascinating language that I use regularly, and its brilliant insights have inspired my artworks, including some based on mathematical systems that are attempting to visualise higher dimensions: things that we can鈥檛 make a picture of yet which can be described mathematically. The challenge is to find ways I can use concepts that cannot be visualised in two, three or four dimensions, and yet somehow cast shadows into the world, rather like a hypercube. These concepts are very exciting because they鈥檙e both rational and counterintuitive.
Here art has an advantage over science in that its methodology can be tumbling and contradictory, whereas strict mathematical language tends to be built on axioms, rules of inference and theorems, and has to be consistent. With art you make a creative leap of faith, and later you explain it.
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I鈥檓 not interested in science as a process, but I am interested in nature, and science is a very convenient and elegant language to use to explore that. I have works I call the Nature Paintings, not because they are pictures of nature, as in Constable, but because they are paintings made by nature, made by the same forces that made me and you, and the Earth.
They happened when I tried to find chemicals with different viscosities and hydrophobic qualities that didn鈥檛 mix well and reacted in certain ways to heat. I put them together to create chemical reactions that were scale-invariant, so zoom in and the painting looks as intricate and fractally beautiful as it does from a distance. Some of the paintings are reminiscent of cell structures or river basins. My conclusion, rational or otherwise, is that this is because the same mathematical laws, in a closed system, operate in my painting as operate in that cell wall or river basin. So, I really didn鈥檛 do them, nature did 鈥� although I get a cut!
This makes me feel nostalgic for the days when there was no differentiation between being a natural historian or an artist-theologian. The lives of Newton or da Vinci seem much richer. The specification and reductionism of knowledge has given us many technological advancements, but I feel that we鈥檝e lost a holistic synthesis. That鈥檚 not a cerebral question, it鈥檚 an emotional one.
If you鈥檙e using reason alone, you鈥檙e looking at the phenomena and at your paradigm. Ultimately, you will change your paradigm to make sense of the paradoxes that occur, so reason can be a very slow process 鈥� it requires a very incremental approach, since those axioms must be preserved if the method of reason is going to be maintained.
Using a more intuitive approach can accelerate the process, but to prove or disprove the result by reason is a long process, and as an artist you鈥檙e impatient. When people say things, you draw conclusions that are not reasonable, but they are emotional or intuitive, and often very fulfilling creatively 鈥� science would never accept that.
When we look at the offspring of reason, such as string theory, which is currently getting a bad press, they look as if reason originally came up with extremely elegant ideas but that now they鈥檝e got very convoluted. My intuition is that a much simpler paradigm is required to solve the problem: so long as you鈥檙e trying to solve it using the kind of thinking that created it, you鈥檒l come up with complex, bizarre ideas. If you鈥檙e going to have a grand unified idea of reality, which is basically the simplest reflection of your paradigm, it鈥檚 hard to do that the incremental way because you can鈥檛 make a sweeping judgement: you鈥檙e 鈥渁rtistically鈥� stuck in your process!
Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue
