I was fortunate to have an opportunity to show work alongside Dorothy Ramsay and Andrea Kershaw in the centre of Penrith at Gallery 4a over the Easter holidays 2023. As local newspaper, the News and Star reported, we were coming together as “three talented artists, each of whom brings their own distinct style and approach to their work”.
I brought some of my recent work about climate change, alongside new work that develops ideas that have been bubbling for some time. The more I dig into the relationship between art and physics, the more I find, from residencies at CERN to Antony Gormley’s Quantum Clouds series of sculptures.
The work I showed at Gallery 4a was inspired by the first second after the universe came into being, when a quantum soup of fizzling energy expanded, cooled and settled down enough for the first particles to form. Unimaginable in scale, yet a frontier in our development of cosmology and fundamental physics, as well as being a source of inspiration for my work.
Image 1: Fundamental 1, ink, water and paint on paper, partly machine-drawn, 420 x 297mm
These works on paper are made using a process that runs between drawing by hand, building software, drawing by robot, and painting by hand. There are connections between my complicated art-making process and the subject matter; the indeterminate nature of reality at small scales, the inter-connectedness of everything, the emergence of particles from energy.
The work I showed made up a small wall display that I’ll be reworking and possibly developing further for an upcoming exhibition.
Image 2: Gallery 4a during The New and the Old exhibition
Steve Meyfroidt, Artist 