alexandra carr mrss

The Ordered Universe

This collaboration is concerned with light, sound, colour and the order of the cosmos. The Ordered Universe Project first came to my attention at a lecture I attended at the Royal Society titled 'The 13th Century Theory of Everything'. The project is a multidisciplinary project headed by Prof. Giles Gasper and Prof. Tom McLeish of Durham University, investigating medieval science through the scientific works of English thinker Robert Grossesteste (c.1170-1253). The treatises cover a range of subjects including colour, sound, the rainbow and the order of the cosmos. The above video gives an introduction to the project and demonstrates the breadth of disciplines involved in the collaboration.

The Ordered Universe project examines the scientific works of one of the most remarkable minds of the middle ages: those of the English polymath Robert Grosseteste (c.1170-1253). Led by academics at the Universities of Durham and Oxford, the project brings together an international team of codicologists, Latinists, philosophers, theologians, historians, vision psychologists, physicists, cosmologists, and engineers to unlock the richness of Grosseteste’s thoughts on diverse natural phenomena, from the nature of sound to the configuration of the cosmos.

The prismatic images above and the video below form part of the work carried out in the Through a Glass Darkly collaboration with the National Glass Centre as part of the Ordered Universe project.

The studies below were made in response to Grosseteste’s theory of light and colour.

I was artist in the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at Durham University as part of the project, during the summer of 2017. The residency, 'Sculpting with Light: Medieval and Modern Cosmology' explored the central importance of light to the universe in both periods, the notion of power and movement within the heavens, the importance of geometry in establishing sense of place, and ideas about unity and complexity, order and disorder, structure and entropy. Below are a collection of outputs from the residency that range from sculpture and installation to video. Click on the individual images to learn more about each artwork.

The above video is a collection of participatory photographic light paintings made during my Levrhulme residency in collaboration with the Ordered Universe project