Pattern - Search

American artist Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight. The artist’s ongoing series of aerial net sculptures started in 1997 when she was in India as a Fulbright Scholar and became fascinated with the beauty and movement of traditional fishing nets. In 2011 her installation 'Tsunami 1.26' hung over the Town Hall traffic intersection in Sydney as a joint initiative of the Powerhouse Museum and Art and About Sydney.

Margot Osborne

Exhibitions to Watch

Stephanie Radok

Editorial: Pattern & Complexity

Margot Osborne

Artrave

Stephanie Britton

Prophecy, pattern, progeny: Champagne Valentine, Mitchell Whitelaw, Peter Miller, Tracy Cornish

Melinda Rackham

The inchworm revisited

Artist, writer and honorary visiting Professor at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in England Paul Brown sketches out the long intertwining history of the relationship between C.P. Snow's two cultures - art and science, design and mathematics, beauty and computation, and extrapolates upon Lady Ada Lovelace's famous words: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."

Paul Brown

Fractal food

John Walker is the founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. In Fractal Food he discusses the marvel of fractal forms (complex shapes which look more or less the same at a wide variety of scale factors) as they are seen in a rather wonderful vegetable - the chou Romanesco.

John Walker

Openwork patterns: Love Lace

Powerhouse Museum Curator of Textiles Lindie Ward discusses the groundbreaking 'Love Lace' exhibition on show at the Powerhouse until April 2013. A globally sourced series of works it showcases 130 designs for openwork structures from 20 countries.

Lindie Ward

A Meme is born

Adelaide writer and artist Peter Drew looks at various examples of recent street art and the many ways it is circulated and reproduced as a meme in a wired and globally connected world. "As it turns out," he says, "memetics can be very useful in understanding the patterns of street art."

Peter Drew

Not just black and white

Scholar and inaugural director of the new Godinymayin Yijard Rivers Arts and Culture Centre in Katherine Cath Bowdler discusses the work of two indigenous artists Brook Andrew and Gunybi Ganambarr and suggests that they are both operating at a conceptual level as bricoleurs in a globalised world, inventing new juxtapositions of materials and revealing new ways of seeing the world through the prism of local histories and traditions.

Cath Bowdler

Socially engaged FIFO art? IASKA's Spaced

Gregory Pryor

Australian art abroad: Doing it better

Alison Carroll

Shadows of meaning in the Eko Chamber: Eko Nugroho

James Bennett

The future is now: Sam Songailo's short-circuits

Matt Huppatz

Helen Fuller: Bless this mesh

John Neylon

Caroline Durré: Reforming the earth

Drawing Studio and Program Co-ordinator at Monash University Stephen Garrett examines the optically challenging artworks of Caroline Durré which blend patterns and perspectives.

Stephen Garrett

The Poliness wall drawings: not quite right

Artist Kerrie Poliness writes about her wall drawing projects, one of which appears in the exhibition 'Art, Pattern and Complexity' at RiAus, Adelaide from 16 February to 16 May 2012. The wall drawings begin with the artist's instructions but are produced with intuition rather than rulers.

Kerrie Poliness

Mesne: Stitches in the Air: computational craft

Media artist, techno-evangelist and digital nomad Fee Plumley responds to Mesne Design Studio's lacemaking environment 'Pricking Version 2.0' which is their answer to the question “what happens if you apply computational processes to the historical notion of craft?”.

Fee Plumley

Shape of the wind: pattern & chaos in Sue Lovegrove's island art

Head of Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania and writer Peter Hay describes the recent paintings of Sue Lovegrove made from her experience of different islands off the coast of Tasmania - Maatsuyker Island, Egg Island and most recently Tasman Island. Lovegrove began with painting clouds but has moved on to paint the shape of the wind.

Peter Hay

Mesne: Pattern In(formation)

Tim Schork and Paul Nicholas founded MESNE Design Studio, an innovative architecture and urban design studio working globally as one office from London and Melbourne, to explore the relationship between architecture and divergent domains of knowledge through the use of computation in order to create innovative design strategies for novel spatial structures. They write about the back story of the project "Pricking', an interdisciplinary collaborative project between MESNE Design Studio, Ian Maxwell (supermanoeuvre) and Indae Hwang, which involves an interactive lace-making table with an infra-red based multi-touch interface.

Tim Schork and Paul Nicholas

Pipilotti Rist I Packed the Postcard in my Suitcase

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 21 December 2011 – 4 March 2012

Ulanda Blair

Tooth and Nail

Grand Opening Exhibition Adelaide December 2011

Peter Drew

Medi(t)ation - 2011 Asian Art Biennial

1 October 2011 – 1 January 2012 Curator: Iris Shu-Ping Huang National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts?(NTMoFA) www.asianartbiennial.org

Sarah Bond

Everyday the possible

Sonia Donnellan, Anna Hughes & Sonja Porcaro South Australian School of Art (SASA) Gallery 14 August - 16 September 2011

Lisa Harms

Sequences and Cycles: contemporary ceramics from the desert

Pantjiti Lionel, Mel Robson, Pip McManus, Patsy Morton, Suzi Lyon, Amanda McMillan Co-curators: Jo Herbig and Franca Barraclough Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs 19 November 2011 - 22 January 2012

Kieran Finnane