This sculpture consists of three highly polished silver triangles that are interconnected. You may feel as if you are looking at a drawing by M.C. Escher when you look at this sculpture and try to follow the line of any one of these three triangles. The flat, mirror-like surfaces of each triangle reflect everything around them, branches, leaves, sky, which further adds to the depth and perhaps confusion of this sculpture. The sculpture seems shorter than it's four foot height, maybe because all the different openings created by the interconnecting of the triangles and the angled position of the three triangles draw your eye more horizontally than vertically.
This sculpture is in front of The Fields Institute, a centre for mathematical research, at the University of Toronto. There are other editions of this sculpture at The Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge University and The Aspen Institute in Colorado, USA.
From the artist:
"Intuition
HEIGHT 4FT POLISHED STAINLESS STEEL 1993
"Genetic Vision"
I have already spoken of my earlier sculpture Creation and how I used the Borromean Rings. A full explanation of the Borromean Rings can be found in the Mathematical Section of these pages.
For me this sculpture represents a knotted core of stability within the centre of knowledge, from which comes sparks of originality and invention, often for no apparent reason. We call these sparks Intuition. The sparks shoot in all directions, but come from the core of experience. Many viewers of these pages will have seen the film 2001, and will remember the opening scenes! Intuition plays a major part in the creative progress of our species, and will probably be the saviour of our civilisation in the future.
Some time after I had finished the sculpture, I had a letter from Dr Peter Cromwell enclosing a photograph of a 9th century Scandinavian RunesStone, showing the 'Star of Wotan'. It is a version of my sculpture!
Isaac Newton's intuition changed the world, so for my Intuition to be at the entrance of the Institution in Cambridge that is named after him is an unbelievable honour.
It is also a great pleasure that a copy of Intuition has been donated by Damon de Laszlo and Robert Hefner III to the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences, Toronto, to honour Professor H.S.M. Coxeter's 90th birthday on February 9, 1997. When I met him for discussions of this in 1996, he told me of an amazing arrangement of spheres, and this led to a new sculpture Firmament.
Perhaps some day Intuition will house a Mathematics Pantheon, as has been envisaged by the structural engineers Ove Arup."
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