About

The Colour Four explores what happens when ideas normally expressed through equations, experiments, theories and words are translated into images.

The work moves between science, technology and human experience, drawing on subjects ranging from quantum mechanics, cosmology and artificial intelligence to perception, memory, identity and social behaviour. Each piece usually begins with a phrase, question or scientific idea. From there, it is reduced, rearranged and translated into a visual structure using geometry, photography, found imagery, drawing and text.

The final works take different material forms—including etching, photogravure, collage, fine-art printing and laser-engraving. The choice of process is often connected to the idea itself: precision and repetition, permanence and erosion, analogue and digital information, or the transformation of an image from one physical state into another.

From science to visual practice

My return to art began through science.

I studied fine art with a focus on printmaking prior to pursuing a career in science and spent most of my professional life working in academic research and pharmaceutical drug discovery. Science taught me to think in terms of systems: to look for relationships between things, reduce complicated problems into their essential parts, construct models and use those models to ask better questions.

It also made images an important part of how I think.

Scientific research constantly requires things that cannot easily be seen—molecular interactions, biological pathways, probabilities, mechanisms and large datasets—to be converted into visual forms that other people can understand. Over time, diagrams, figures, information design and visualization became more than tools for communicating the science. They became another way of thinking about it.

The Colour Four developed from that intersection.

Rather than illustrating scientific ideas literally, I became interested in what happens when they are removed from their original technical context and treated as material for an artwork. A matrix can become a landscape. Particle interactions can become lines connecting distant points. A model of artificial intelligence can become a speculative portrait of another kind of mind.

The same approach gradually expanded beyond science. Questions about consciousness lead naturally to questions about perception; perception to memory and identity; technology to power and responsibility; and biological systems to the ways people organize themselves socially.

This is why apparently different subjects coexist within the work.

Quantum physics, nuclear fusion and cosmology sit alongside artificial intelligence, architecture, trauma, compassion, exploitation and human behaviour. They are connected by an interest in systems—physical, technological, biological and social—and in the ways we construct models to understand realities that are often more complicated than the models themselves.

Geometry and abstraction recur throughout the work for similar reasons. They provide a visual language for relationships: proximity and separation, order and disorder, connection, scale, boundaries and change. Scientific diagrams, numerical systems and informational graphics sometimes enter the work, but are altered until their original explanatory function becomes less certain.

The objective is not to provide an illustration of a scientific theory or a definitive explanation of an idea. The artwork begins with the concept, but should ultimately be able to move beyond it.

The Colour Four is an evolving collection of these investigations—images made at the intersection of scientific thinking, visual systems and human experience.