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18 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 22 OCTOBER 2023 NEWS Artworks 'in disguise' – the Conrad Eminent British contemporary artist Conrad Shawcross's showcase What Is To Become Is Already Here marks a new high for MICAS ahead of its grand 2024 opening. Here the sculptor speaks to MaltaToday about his fascination with science and why his work takes the fast and hard rules of maths and physics to uncover a poetic core ACROSS the Msida Creek, the colourful rotating discs that announce the arrival of Conrad Shawcross's MICAS Beacons elicit all kinds of expectations. Towering above the historic fortifications that house the Malta International Contem- porary Art Space, this "signal" alerts the world to the immi- nent opening of MICAS. The august works that have marked the Malta Interna- tional Art Festival – now in its fifth year – all seemed to have accompanied the patient com- pletion of this impressive art space. First with Ugo Rondi- none's The Radiant when the MICAS works started in and around the Sa Maison gardens; then with Cristina Iglesias's Sea Cave (Entrance) and Michelle Oka Doner's The Palm God- dess located both in Valletta amid the pacing of the daily crowds. Now, an impressive showcase by the eminent Brit- ish contemporary artist Con- rad Shawcross brings us back to MICAS at the threshold of its grand opening in 2024, beckoned by the light reflected off Beacons's colourful discs. Steel, glass, wood... and geom- etry. These attributes are the mark of Shawcross's body of work over the last 18 years. Ea- ger to talk about his fascination with scientific thought, Shaw- cross is heavily invested in the huge amount of time it takes to work out the geometries and proportions of his works, for as their scale expands, radiantly emerging out of the centre, he pushes the boundaries of these structures, until they might ap- pear to be floating. The tetrahedron has become Shawcross's key building block. "It's the simplest of platonic solids," he says of the 3D shapes where each face is the same as a regular polygon with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. "So, it represents the atom in Greek philosophy," Shawcross adds, which is why geometrically it allows him to find new pathways into inter- esting and potent works. "It just keeps on giving." But underneath this very ra- Shawcross's keen interest in the history of ideas has allowed the artist to employ the heavy materiality of his artworks to reveal conceptual fault lines