THE RECTANGLE

Throughout my practice I have repeatedly returned to the theme of the rectangle, its variations and proportions.  They have always been the dominant urban shape but, with the ubiquity of the screen they are determining, more than ever, how we see the world.  In ‘All Soles’ I hung four large graphite and aluminium rectangular shapes, each slightly different from the last around the walls of the Brompton Cemetery.  Then I became interested in how the shaped rectangle of the phone so suddenly appeared in the urban visual landscape.  ‘Rectangular’ was a straightforward exploration of different shapes and in ‘Open and Shut’ I played with the shape of the laptop.  More recently I have considered two different rectangles – the root 2 rectangle and the golden section.  the root 2 rectangle is the proportion of International Paper Size that has such an effect on how we think (I always think about how my writing might change if I wrote on long, thin scrolls).  In ‘Paper Economy’ I wanted to place this common rectangle amongst office buildings where most of the paper being used was A4.  In ‘Natural Frequency’ I was interested placing golden section rectangles that appear throughout nature, in a natural landscape.