Output details

0 to 10,000,000 - a suspended permanent artwork

This artwork investigates how the combining and synthesis of current artistic, and scientific methods, can form new, and challenging approaches, and discourses in the production of site specific artworks.

The theoretical references included the seminal text by CP Snow on ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959), and contemporary publications that revisit the art, humanities, and science discourse, such as ‘Art & Science’ by Ede (2005), and ‘Visualizations, The Nature Book of Art and Science’, by Martin Kemp (2000).

The research enquiry attempted to show how art, and science, can or cannot, combine to make a new aesthetic and conceptual genre. Helen Chadwick, Cornelia Parker and Daphne Wright’s work contributed to the contextualising of this research.

The methodological process involved questioning:

1. The scientific method, as a way of understanding living matter, including ethical, impartial and empirical approaches.

2. New digital approaches that can inform sculptural language, as mediated through the use of 3D prototyping, and laser technologies.

3. Visual aesthetics, and the use of metaphor, in combining artistic and scientific intentions, and concepts to form new artworks.

This research lead to Cattrell being invited to produce a new commission by Oxford University.

‘0 to 10,000,000’ is a suspended permanent artwork for the air space in the atrium, in the purpose built new Biochemistry Department, designed by award winning architects Hawkins Brown.

Cattrell’s initial research involved dialogues with Professor Jonathan Hodgkin, of Oxford University Biochemistry Department, about his cutting edge and his research into developmental genetics. Hodgkin’s recent research had contributed to the joint winning of a Nobel Prize in 2009, at Cambridge University, and winning the Genetics Society Medal in 2012.

This research has lead to further commission invitations including at Ohio University and at Oxford Brookes University.