CrumpArt

I became obsessed with Physics over the summer holidays. I started out searching for books on stellar myths, and ended up with about twenty science books. I never studied Physics at school… I never even knew what it was about, really. My idea of Physics was that it was a science about maths. I didn’t realise it was so absolutely fascinating.

Somebody in one of the books I read quoted this, which R.H. Davis wrote in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1995:
“Einstein’s fundamental insights of space/matter relations came out of philosophical musings about the nature of the universe, not from rational analysis of observational data — the logical analysis, prediction and testing coming only after the formation of the creative hypotheses.”
It’s such a simple truth, and the one thing about science that I never quite grasped in high school. Maths and science were always about practical things. Adding, subtracting, memorising charts of chemical compounds. They don’t tell you that science can also be about dreaming, and then finding the proof to back up your ideas.

Anyway, that little picture up the top of this post is a snippet of what I did last night. Mr Crumpet went off to a party, and I decided not to go because I really needed to get this work done. First, I spent a good hour and then some cleaning up my studio, then I set up the relevant computer hardware and scanned in a bunch of photocopies taken from a whole variety of books. They cover different belief systems about the universe through time. For this project, I’m interested in how different ideas of the universe and creation (science, religion, myth and so on) coexist and overlap, and why people believe the things that they do.

I was originally planning on using layers of lithography for my prints, but after looking at my research and thinking about all the different ideas that appear, it makes much more sense for each printed layer to be a different technique. So there’ll be lithography, linocuts, woodcuts, etching, embossing, collographs, monoprints and more, all on top of one another.

It might be awful, but I’m hoping for a beautiful mess.