Interview with Dominic Hopkinson

What’s your educational background? 

 After A levels, I went to Swindon College of Art & Design to do an art foundation course, then went to Exeter College of Art & Design to study fine art.

How did your interest in art/sculpture begin?

I have always been good at drawing and really enjoyed the subject throughout school, so it was a pretty obvious choice for me to want to go to art college. 

Up until my foundation course, I had only ever done painting, no sculpture, so I assumed I would go to college and paint. 

When I arrived for my foundation course I found myself in the sculpture studio, my tutor was a stone carver who introduced the process to me, and I haven’t done a painting ever since.

Tell us about your work

At the end of the first year of my degree, I read an interview with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who discovered fractals. This single piece of writing set me on a career-long course of researching how maths and science automatically generate three dimensional form in nature.

 This seems to be a fundamentally significant process for a sculptor to be interested in. Where does shape come from? How does that form grow and develop?

At school, I hated maths and had to study really hard just to pass it at O Level, but I quickly realised that maths in particular was about massive ideas. The origin of number, the universe, us, truth, reality, philosophy, again I think, crucial concepts for an artist to be thinking about.

Because I have no formal background in the sciences, I rely on finding interested scientists and mathematicians willing to collaborate with me to enable my research. I have worked in the past with the interdisciplinary think tank “egenis” (part of the Economic and Social Research Council) based at the University of Exeter, studying the impact of the Human Genome Project. More recently I have spent over a year as artist in residence at the School of Mathematics at University of Leeds researching how aperiodic tiling systems work in two, three and more dimensions.

Think of tiling using square tiles, and how ordered that is. Now think of how the pattern on wallpaper matches from piece to piece. Well aperiodic tiling is a strange set of tiling that don’t do either of those things. The mathematicians I was sitting with generate computerised models of how these tiling function in three dimensional space at the scale of atoms in a lattice, known as quasicrystals.

My work includes diverse yet intimately connected ideas such as platonic solids, spherical geometry, closest packing, aperiodic tiling, crystallography, Turing patterns and reaction/diffusion processes in biology and chemistry.

I try to understand all this sufficiently well to create a process for making sculptures that mimics the algorithmic, iterative process of the maths, making a unit many times and following a set of rules for how these units are allowed to be put together.

What/who inspires your work?

After graduating, I worked as a studio assistant to the sculptor Peter Randall-Page. Mine and Peter’s work comes from exactly the same place intellectually, our research concerns are very similar. This was something of an accident as I’d started down this research route before meeting Peter.

Other artists that inspire me are Bridget Riley and Rachel Whiteread for their techniques and processes, and the dedication to research that appears to manifest in their work.

The American polymath Buckminster-Fuller and his working relationship with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi is a special case of interdisciplinary work.

But ultimately, I’m truly inspired by the depth, complexity and beauty of ideas that scientific endeavour reveals to us. Sometimes this is personified by people like Sir Roger Penrose, the mathematician who gives his name to the most well-known aperiodic tiling system. Or Benoit Mandlebrot, the discoverer of fractals. Yet really, I’m here for the big ideas/questions. Where did we come from? Does a scientific or mathematical truth exist? Did we invent mathematics or discover it? Is there a God? These things keep me awake at night.

Where have you exhibited? 

“Time, Space, Existence” group show at the Venice Architecture Biennale. 2018 
Elemental Sculpture Park, Cirencester. 2017
Elected a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. 2016
“A Study of Aperiodic Tiling; With Special Reference to the Third Dimension” solo show BasementArtsProject, Leeds. 2015
“A Harmony of Spheres” solo show BasementArtsProject, Leeds. 2014
“Buckminster, Meet Plato” solo show at York College Gallery. 2012
“Plato, Meet Buckminster” solo show at South Square Gallery, Bradford. 2010
Group shows at the Art Works Gallery, and The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle. 2008, 2009
Munster Skultur Projekt, Munster, Germany. 2007
“Molecular Inflation” solo show The Northcote Gallery University of Exeter. 2006
South West Academy Show, Royal Albert Memorial Museum Exeter. 2005  
Various other group shows around the country, and work held in public and private collections.

What’s next for you?

 I have been invited to be a participant of the Leeds Creative Labs: Bragg Edition, led by the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds which brings together science academics and arts practitioners for a period of collaborative discussion, without any direct brief, to see what happens.

Continue working with the curator Bruce Davies of BasementArtsProject to complete the siting of a public sculpture for Leeds, in Beeston as part of the “On The Corner” program set up as part of the Index Festival during the YSI.

Continue my research and my making. This is a process that never stops, as all the work demands to be made, with each piece shedding light on new ideas, theories and concepts that require further research. My advice to any art student or recent graduate would always be “try not to ever stop the making, the audience will eventually find your work if it has been made”.