This series began with a visit to the Science Museum when Conrad Shawcross was a student, 25 years ago. Inside the long-since-closed Maths gallery, amidst glass vitrines lined with psychedelic wallpapers, one object caught the artist’s attention: a harmonograph. This was a Victorian machine that was originally made to analyze the vibrations caused by trains traveling at speed underneath buildings when they were constructing London’s Tube system, acting like an early seismograph. Shawcross was taken with this old-fashioned way to visualize and ‘swap the senses around’, evoking the experience of synaesthesia. He went about building his own version of the machine, which produced a picture of a chord falling into silence.

‘I was essentially trying to make a very beautiful, compelling object - At the end of the day I’m an artist – but there was also an attempt to cloak it in the aesthetic of the rational or of an empirical process’, Shawcross says. ‘When you go into a gallery you can say: oh, it’s just art, I don’t need to understand it. Whereas if you walk into a junk shop or a charity shop and you find some strange esoteric object, you can’t dismiss it, you have to work out what it’s for’.

Courtesy of Plinth