Mathematics in Art
an exhibition in the Hanna Neumann Building, Australian National University, Canberra ACT
curated by Tim Brook, Mandy Gordon and Tony Martin
Opening
Continuing
Monday–Friday from to until
Hanna Neumann Building
Australian National University
The exhibition
Mathematics in Art is an exhibition of works in a variety of media. A distinct mathematical concept was essential in the development of each of these works.
Walking through the Hanna Neumann Building, viewers can explore the visual variety of works and delight in the beauty of the underlying mathematics.
Background
Ideas from many branches of mathematics have been used by artists and critics to create or analyse works of art. They have been used to influence the content, the colours, the composition and the temporal structure of works.
Penrose introduced Escher to tessellations, but the artistic value of Escher’s work isn’t determined by the underlying symmetry groups. Poincaré inspired Picasso with his description of 4‑dimensional space‑time, but the artistic value of cubism doesn’t depend on special relativity. In this exhibition, the artistic value of each work doesn’t depend on the elegance or otherwise of the underlying mathematics but on an exploration of ideas from a particular artistic tradition and the viewers’ responses to their visual expression.
A number of twentieth century composers explored the use of stochastic processes in works of “aleatoric music”, and some twenty‑first century artists from the ANU have adapted these musical ideas in visual and audio‑visual works. Merely selecting elements at random adds little to a work but, as the composers discovered, stochastic processes with appropriate structure can provide texture in a work whose main features are still determined by the composer.A good example of these processes is a Markov chain: a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. A Markov chain is particularly convenient because it has significant features that are easily revealed by some simple matrix algebra. This illustrates just one of the many ways that mathematics and art may be connected.
Works by
- Natalie Azzopardi
- Michael Barnsley
- Tim Brook
- James Gifford
- Mandy Gordon
- Richard Hassell
- Peter Heiss-Synak
- Teresa Heiss-Synak
- Ruth Hingston
- Paul Kirwan
- Joan Licata
- T. R. Napper
- Pierre Portal
- Vanessa Robins
- Ruibiao Zhu
Works
The works in this exhibition include: code art, ceramics, jewellery, metalwork, music, photography, poetry, sculpture, textiles, video…
The mathematics in some of these works is mundane if not downright trivial. In 1940, GE Hardy explained that the mathematical ideas that others found most useful were usually the ones that mathematicians found most uninspiring. The works in this exhibition make essential use of mathematics but their aesthetic appeal is not in the mathematics: they are works in their own right, not illustrations of mathematical ideas.
