London, Royal Academy of Arts, Annenberg Courtyard, Summer Exhibition, 2015, illustrated in colour in the dedicated catalogue

Conrad Shawcross at 38 is the youngest living Royal Academician. For the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 2015 Conrad Shawcross was commissioned to create a large-scale immersive work for the Annenberg Courtyard: his creation was the present work which consists of steel clouds, comprising multiple tetrahedrons set on tripods and standing over six metres high. Through the canopy of clouds, a dazzling shadow is created by the dappled light of the sun. The artist intends to create a space with his towering steel awning where people might congregate, sit and socialise. As he himself concludes, ‘it's designed to last for ever. It's a shelter; efficient, interactive’. The mechanically and meticulously devised steel clouds which filter the sun illustrate how fleeting moments of beauty and instability can be created through the practice of perfect order and structure.

Shawcross has long been preoccupied with the science of art. He notes how Monet would return to the same view of his lily pads time and time again, creating a control for himself ‘till his paintings began to look like cosmological or microscopic worlds’ (quoted in ‘Art Born of Science’ in Art Quarterly, Spring 2015, p. 64). The ‘tetrahedron’ is the central element of the present work which the artist appreciats for its strict adherence to unruliness: “there is one rule, which [inventor] Buckminster Fuller called the tetrahelix, which is that if y🍸ou put them together in a certain order it forms a triple helix, like triple DNA, and it carries on spiralling forever. It never actually repeats itself because it’s got this weird 72.9-degree angle so they never come round full circle. So here we’re taking that irrational helix and we’ve enlarged it by 10 per cent after each turn so it just grows like a beanstalk” (ibid pp. 65-66).