Genius Loci is a site-specific sculpture developed for a location adjacent to an experimental vineyard that has been established by a neuroscientist whose research focuses on Parkinson's disease. The sculpture has evolved from a dialogue between the artist and the scientist at the intersection of their interests and alludes to the complex web of affinity between the environment that it inhabits and our own internal landscapes. The work is named after an animistic term used to describe the prevailing character or atmosphere of a site - the spirit of the place. Genius loci has kinship with terroir, a term used to describe the complex web of relationships between human and more-than-human ecologies that define the character of a wine
The sculpture is formed of a branching network - a fundamental motif in the way material reality is structured over vastly different levels of scale from quantum to universal. The open, ascending form has an archetypal vegetal quality, alluding to the domesticated vines climbing ancestral predecessor that sprawled wild and untended through the understories of Western Asian forests. Like the vines nearby - novel hybrids cultivated to survive the extremes of temperature in their boreal environment - it is also a product of hybridisation, in this case a synthesis of handmade and digital. The form of the sculpture is derived from a series of handmade objects that were digitally scanned and assembled virtually, then 3D printed, cast in bronze and patinated by hand. The work is the sum of its self-similarity - an exploration of the interplay between order and chaos in a complex, bilaterally symmetrical, furcating system
Circumnavigating the sculpture it appears elusive and ambiguous - simultaneously neurological and vegetal, animal, coralline and mycorrhizal - not one thing or the other, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It's only when the viewer arrives a few degrees to centre on two sides of the sculpture that the symmetry in the work becomes apparent. The experience of symmetry allows us to see ourselves seeing - to experience our perceptual biology. We experience our minds trying to make sense of the uncanny conjunction
Symmetry stimulates pareidolia, a perceptual response that has evolved through natural selection to make sense of the world. Pareidolia refers to the tendency to perceive pattern in random visual stimuli - faces in clouds or Jesus in a piece of toast. This widely experienced phenomenon has been shown to relate to increased activity in a part of the brain known as the fusiform face area, that plays a role in facial recognition. Researchers propose that pareidolia gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage, enabling them to avoid danger by being able to identify potential threats from other humans and animals more efficiently. There is a higher incidence of pareidolia in people who have Parkinson's disease for reasons that aren't yet known
Like a three-dimensional Rorschach inkblot, how the viewer attributes meaning to the psychedelic fecundity that results from the symmetrical conjunction in the sculpture - neural network or cosmic web, vertebrae or vulva - says as much about them as it does about the sculpture