Interdisciplinary artist Louisa Magrics works in the space between the musical and the visual by literally crocheting the two together.
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The Newcastle University PhD candidate currently has a collaborative work Hyperweb on exhibition at Sydney Vivid.
The work, which is suspended 6m in the air, near the Sydney Opera House until June 16, includes lighting design by Calum Young, interaction design by Stephen Miller Haynes and production by Chuck Grotte.
The work is coupled with curated sound and lighting which sees the work pick up data from humidity, wind and temperature and that queues sound samples and light. Movement also queues bird-sounds from the Botanical Gardens.
It is a work of 6000 loops made from more than 2.5km of rope and took the artist one month to make
Magrics is also a drummer who plays across various genres – punk, progressive rock and hip hop.
“I got into world music a couple of years ago and that was really eye opening in terms of understanding rhythm differently and that was a big part of what inspired the crocheted pattern,” Magrics said.
“The understanding of how you can put rhythm together in different ways. There is a much broader way to understand it.
“Western approaches to music are really rigid, in terms of 4/4 time structures, where as in world music rhythm is seen as much more of a conversation. You can put any numbers next to each other and it’s more about how it feels and how it flows.”
These musical ideas have been explored in her visual art practice.
“A few years ago I started thinking about what these patterns would look like, particularly the idea of off-beats and on-beats,” Magrics said.
“I started thinking about the space in-between the hits and started crocheting patterns to explore that idea.
“I saw geometric patterns and was like ‘what, this is amazing’.
“Then I fell into a rabbit hole and got really obsessed in terms of trying to figure all the different patterns I could make and the possibilities in terms of extrapolating them into three dimensions.
“They ended up as these tensile structures that are now based on these dual solids.”
Dual solids are the alignment of two figures, where the vertices of one correspond to the faces of the other and the edges between pairs of vertices of one correspond to the edges between pairs of faces of the other.
“Because it’s so heavily influenced by numbers, mathematics starts to become a big part of the work,” Magrics said.
