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19 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 22 OCTOBER 2023 NEWS Conrad Shawcross showcase at MICAS tionalist and indeed scientific approach to art – for what we see are machines crafted by these laws of science – is what Shawcross believes is a "quite poetic heart, a more metaphys- ical or undefinable kind at its core." He calls them 'artworks in disguise', where the utilitar- ian exterior of these machines hide something more irrational beneath. 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. Paradigm, one of the tallest public sculptures in central London at 14 metres, appears to defy gravity as the twisting stack of tetrahedra grow in size, teetering right to the edge of collapse – for Shawcross, who wants to capture the epis- temological drive of science as it progresses by 'toppling the paradigm', collapse is an essen- tial part of this process or any life-cycle. It is hard to divorce Shaw- cross's sculptures from the feats of engineering they rep- resent, the tactile nature of the welded steel, and the physicali- ty of their coming together, just like Beacons has to be finally erected with the necessary use of a crane. It is a process, Shaw- cross points out, also redolent of the science and graft pres- ent in many other art forms – the daily grind of the creative process. "In reality, being an artist involves processes that are very menial, repetitive and very hard work... the reality of what we do is tough and quite boring. Sometimes it's arriving at the idea that involves a huge amount of toil. But it is reward- ing, with wonderful, poetic re- sults... they're a struggle." So Shawcross avers against ig- noring the radicality of art as a scientific experiment in and of itself. "Renaissance painters at the time were at the vanguard of a sort of experimentation, mixing chemicals, finding ra- re pigments from all over the world... in Afghanistan, Ven- ice... it was essentially alche- my," he says of a time so dis- tant from today's convenience of acquiring paint in tubes and stretches of canvas. "But back then, this was a hugely radical medium with a scientific ap- proach to a problem." This innate mission, for Shaw- cross, is to create "reproduc- ible, analogue experiences in an increasingly digital world." It's a statement in which he takes pride, suggesting that the complexity of his works could yet crash a computer attempt- ing to digitally render its cre- ation and movements. That's a prospect that excites the artist who lauds the behold- er's eye as "such an incredible instrument". For in admiring Shawcross's work, one must take in the monumental space it occupies, a visceral experi- ence that is also very impor- tant to him – as in Patterns of Absence (2021), whose two rotating discs still elicit a phys- ical reaction in the artist him- self ("it sends a tingle down my spine"). And Shawcross makes no judgement on how viewers receive his work – it's all up to them, filtered through their in- dividual histories, gender, pol- itics, education, love or trau- ma. "The more diverse those interpretations, the better the artwork... if everyone sees the same thing, it's probably not a good artwork." Beacons is itself a challenging work, for from the views across the Creek, one is immediately faced by its colourful incongru- ity atop the deserted La Vittoria bastion's limestone. Its stain- less and galvanised steel masts, at 7.5 metres in height, support a pair of counter-rotating sem- aphoric, optic discs, powered by the light of the sun and sky – like a stained-glass window, as the light filters through a pat- tern of hundreds of thousands of non-repeating holes, the colours of the maritime flags' semaphoric code spell out the word 'NOW'. Part child's play- fulness, part naval warning sys- tem, Shawcross's work needs ample ballast and counter- weights to withstand the wind speeds; decked in hard-hat and yellow vest, Shawcross assists with the lifting. "I'm a bit of a big kid really... give me a crane and I'm happy." Shawcross however likes to think that Beacons, in the way that its 'NOW' heralds the im- minent opening of MICAS, also captures the concept of time that is represented by the storied past of the fortifi- cations it is housed in. While we might be tempted to dis- miss the fallow periods that followed the ebbing of the militaries that roamed these structures, Shawcross instead considers this arc of history with trepidation. Take the cli- mate crisis, he says: "There is a lag between what we do now and what happens later... the new, extreme weather patterns and rise in temperatures are the consequence of things we did 10, or even 100 years ago. There are consequences to all our actions... and until then, there is a sense of what that consequence is. 'What is to be- come is already here'," he says, namedropping the foreboding title of his showcase. "There is a sort of sense, in seeing the world in such a mess, that we know something is here, but always about to happen. I don't want to be too apocalyptic, but it does seem that one of the reasons the hu- man race is so good at survival is that we're so good at imagin- ing all the ways we can die." It is this evolutionary sort of imagination – "the crazy apoc- alypses we conjure up" – that pushes humans into develop- ing so many ingenious ways to protect themselves from catastrophe. "It's one of the reasons religion kind of came about, with moral systems and behaviours that are designed to prevent us from 'dying'," Shaw- cross says, unveiling the poet- ic heart of his towering, 'early warning' signal as we cast our eye onto the Floriana bastions. Shawcross's other predomi- nant work will be The Dappled Light of the Sun (Formation I), acquired by MICAS as part of its permanent collection. One of his significantly mature works, this composition – a floating, five-metre cloud-like structure of 6,000 welded tri- angles forming around 1,600 tetrahedrons – harnesses his fascination with the perpetual motion of the natural world. "It almost feels like it's being held down, rather than held up," he says. "In fact, it weighs five tonnes, but because of the sort of proportions of the tripods, it has this elegance... it's almost floating, tethered down rath- er than supported. So, it's got this sort of lightness despite its weight." The other works by Shaw- cross will be Slow Arc within a Cube (I, VI, VII, XI, XIII, XIV), Patterns of Absence, Limit of Everything and Paradigm Vex (Slender), all displayed in the series of barrel vaults at the base of the battlement walls. Installed in a reverse chrono- logical order, they chronicle the sculptor's journey in his work, from simple structures to his more visceral and com- plex works. "There is a sort of sense, in seeing the world in such a mess, that we know something is here, but always about to happen. I don't want to be too apocalyptic, but it does seem that one of the reasons the human race is so good at survival is that we're so good at imagining all the ways we can die."