This wall drawing was produced as part of Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW), an interdisciplinary project that, “aims to explore how artists might work with scientists to develop a shared understanding of how knowledge can be translated across their disciplinary communities.”
In their introduction to this project, organizers Ingrid Koenig and Randy Lee Cutler explained that the German expression for interdisciplinarity, “aus dem Fenster lehnen,” roughly translates as, “leaning out of the window.”
The first stage of this endeavour began in January 2017, with a series of seminar presentations by physicists on the subject of antimatter, at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre.
Shortly after attending the seminar I began a series of drawings based on the Dirac equation, developed by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928, which predicted the existence of antimatter—the mirror image of ordinary matter. Equations make me think of hieroglyphs—they’re mysterious and cryptic messages that I know carry meaning, but this meaning is impenetrable to me.
For the LOoW exhibition, which took place at Emily Carr University from Jan 26 - Feb 8, 2018, I produced a wall-drawing, which allowed me one final opportunity to handle the Dirac equation. I used powdered graphite applied with brushes to represent a large, out-of-focus, mirrored image of the equation.
Through the course of my participation in the LOoW project, I drew this equation over and over again. While my work failed to wrest the equation’s particular meaning—the play of materiality and gesture I undertook is not unlike the work of experimental physicists, concerned with the observation of physical phenomena.
People often mistake the concern of art and science with the production of things. While both may lead to the production things, they are first and foremost methods of inquiry—their processes allow us to understand and appreciate the universe and our place within it.
