The metaphor of human body as machine is as old as art itself.
In his new work The Nervous System (Umbilical), Hackney-based artist Conrad Shawcross has turned this trope on its head, figuring machinery in human terms.
Commissioned by the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania, the monumental sculpture – 10 metres high and 12 metres in diameter – forms part of the artist’s Rope Makers series.
The giant machine, which has taken more than 10 years to develop, uses 40 interlocking arms to weave a cord from spools of yarn in a sequence of orbits that will never repeat.
Little by little, the resulting rope coils up on the floor, each loop marking a specific period in time.
Built in Conrad’s Hackney studio and currently on display at Here East, the work is both a mechanical feat and a thing of beauty.
As you gaze up at the huge structure slowly winding together strands in primary colours, you may think one minute of the solar system, then a moment later of a 19th-century factory, and perhaps finally of the lengths of human matter that bind us in different ways.
Whatever your thoughts, awe is not likely to be far from them.
The exhibition includes two other works from the same series, Yarn (2001) and Ode to the Difference Engine (2007), that address themes of the ravelling and unravelling undertaken by modern machinery.
For those who read all the placards, this exhibition is extraordinarily rich in historical nuance and cultural reference, but the gentle movement of powerful machinery also operates at a purely visceral level to lull and soothe those of all ages and tastes.
Conrad Shawcross: The Nervous System (Umbilical) runs until 2 November at Timber Yard, Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, 14 East Bay Lane, E15 2GW.
