As a member of The Ruskin School of Art, Conrad Shawcross (1996, Fine Art) spent his time at LMH building connections across colleges and disciplines. As his ‘Cascading Principles’ exhibition at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute comes to an end, he explains how this peripatetic time continues to influence his artistic practice.
Main image (foreground): Formation Study IV (Prevailing Wind), 2018
In the windows: Beacons, (he15D6), (om15D7), (mo15D8), (eh15D9), 2021
Anyone who has taken the short walk from LMH through University Parks and into the Mathematical Institute recently will have ended their journey surrounded by Conrad Shawcross’s beguiling sculptural works. His ‘Cascading Principles’ exhibition, curated by Fatoş Üstek, has been running in the institute since 2022, bringing together nearly 40 works that all explore — as the exhibition’s subtitle explains — geometry, philosophy and interference.
Rather than being collected in a single exhibition space, the works are placed throughout the building, enabling visitors to encounter and engage with them as they study, and discuss themes over a coffee. Walk into the entrance hall and you’re immediately faced with Schism on one side — a large black polyhedral form, made up of twenty tetrahedrons torn apart by the geometry’s inability to evenly tessellate. Flanking this are two Lattice cubes — a bright white geometric explosion, designed to suggest the Big Bang. Walk downstairs to the café and you can enjoy lunch alongside Paradigms, two ascendant forms made up of spiralling tetrahedrons, each one larger than the one below.
Discovering Oxford’s appeal
The institute seems a fitting location for an artist whose work has always crossed multiple disciplines, and who loved Oxford for the breadth of opportunities it provided — even if he was initially unsure whether the city would be able to fuel his creative ambitions.
“I had a typical 18-year-old attitude,” admits Conrad who, in 2016, would go on to become the youngest living artist to be elected to the Royal Academy aged 36. “I was worried that Oxford wasn’t the capital and that the Ruskin wasn’t Central St Martin’s and that I needed to be in London to be a really important artist. But then I arrived and the first term was revelatory. I completely forgot all that prejudice and snobbery and had the most incredible time.”
Students at the Ruskin School of Art are embedded in colleges across Oxford. While Conrad lived, dined and socialised at LMH, he studied on the Bullingdon Road and had more opportunities than many students to build links with other colleges. “I think the Ruskin has got a really interesting, unique and slightly uneasy position,” Conrad says, “because it’s slightly out of the mould of other subjects that exist in a more traditional framework. Its artists are spread across the University and they tend to be these idiosyncratic people who learn to question things and not necessarily answer things. It also meant that by the end of the first term I’d gone to almost every college in the city, which wasn’t the case for many students at LMH.
“And I loved the fact my work was and continues to be very influenced by being surrounded by all these other subjects,” he continues. “My friends weren’t only artists from the Ruskin. I was hanging out with poets and writers and scientists, and going to lectures in those subjects was encouraged and considered very important. It wasn’t an art school that was just about making art or making in-jokes about art history. You were surrounded by the history of ideas.”
(Photo: Paradigm Chamfer (Structural), 2015)
The search for meaning
Conrad believes he also studied at the Ruskin at an auspicious time. “Brian Catling was the Head of Sculpture and he was this amazing, larger-than-life performance artist, very inspiring and evocative and nuanced and unconventional. Stephen Farthing was the Head of Painting. We were very lucky to be there at that time.”
He recalls lectures that strayed far from what might be expected — for example exploring the location of the soul in relation to scientific discoveries and the tension between church and state. Conrad also valued being able to nurture what he describes as, “the deep pleasure of looking at pattern and geometry and seeing meaning within it,” which has continued to run through the core of his work ever since.
“We all long for patterns and we all long for solutions,” he says, warming to the topic, “but sometimes they’re not there. A scientist might spend their whole life looking for a pattern in something but it doesn’t exist. We’ve spent hundreds of years studying the solar system thinking we’d find the grand design, but actually it’s caused by a series of catastrophic events and it's totally random.”
With the ‘Cascading Principles’ exhibition, one of the great pleasures for Conrad has been seeing how scholars from different disciplines identify different patterns and meanings in the work. “I love that all these augmented minds find things that I never would,” he says. “If everyone sees the same thing you probably haven’t created something that interesting, but when people see something different, it’s poetic.”
(Photo: Plosion 1 (Yellow) Large, 2013)
A library for the future
Conrad continued a family tradition by coming to LMH, following in the footsteps of his mother, writer and cultural historian Marina Warner, who studied Modern Languages from 1964. And as ‘Cascading Principles’ comes to an end, one of his next projects will involve finding a very different kind of pattern. Together, Conrad and Marina are attempting to catalogue her vast book collection. Their plan is then to select a few thousand titles to display in a pavilion Conrad is designing and which they hope will be open to the public. If his work so far is anything to go by, the pavilion will be more than just a worthy tribute — to them both. It will also be another way to bring cross-cutting genres and ideas together, continuing the approach that was encouraged so effectively at the Ruskin and LMH almost 30 years ago.
All pictures taken by Richard Ivey
This article first appeared in LMH News 2025. You can read the full issue on our publications page.
Schism (Black Oak), 2022
