Over sixty contributors will have work on display in the exhibition Beyond Measure: conversations across art and science. They include a new sculpture by John Pickering and the Smart Modelling Group at Foster+Partners; work by Turner prize winners Keith Tyson and Richard Deacon; virusstructure models produced by the Nobel winning biophysicist Professor Sir Aaron Klug; Professor Sir Roger Penrose's geometrical explorations of the mathematical foundations of the physical universe and Tom Dixon's pylon chair.
Beyond Measure: conversations across art and science explores how geometry is used by artists and astronomers, engineers, surgeons, architects, physicists and mathematicians - among many others - as a means to explain, understand and order the world around us.
Built around a series of participatory workshops, talks and discussions, Beyond Measure will offer many different ways of engaging with geometry, and many different views of the world we live in. The exhibition draws parallels between the artist's studio, the laboratory and the study as equivalent places for thinking, imagining and creating.
Kettle's Yard Interdisciplinary Fellow Barry Phipps says:
"As the theme of the show suggests, geometry, which began as a tool used to measure the Earth, has since become fundamental to generating and mapping new terrains of science. It is also a question for artists about our engagement with a calculated world."
Artists have always engaged with science and in particular geometry. When Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, it was equally important for artists as it was for science. The fourth dimension became a key theme in Cubist, Futurist and Vorticist art.
Both Picasso and Duchamp made important work exploring the latest theories of geometry. It is their legacy, both in terms of the understanding of space and our position in it that is explored by the artists in this exhibition.
On display will be paintings by Iranian born painter Nader Ahriman, British artist Peter Peri and Anglo-American artist Sarah Morris; an installation by German sound artist Carsten Nicolai; works on paper by artists as diverse as British icon Richard Hamilton and the late Cuban-American Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and sculpture by Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima and the American minimalist Robert Morris.
Alongside the artists work will be objects that have not been previously been seen by the general public. These include the first working model of a hyperbolic surfaces crocheted by mathematician Dania Taimina, and the dividers used by Sir Christopher Wren when designing St Paul's Cathedral.
Beyond Measure: conversations across art and science is organised by Barry Phipps, Kettle's Yard's first Interdisciplinary Fellow. It follows on from his earlier Kettle's Yard exhibition, lines of Enquiry, which looked at drawing across a wide range of disciplines.