Relative to the observer

Originally published 17 June 2007

John Hol­stead is a York­shire­man by birth, a West Ker­ry­man by adop­tion. He has had a check­ered career: marine engi­neer, car­pen­ter, sculp­tor. It is as an artist that I have know him best for thir­ty years. Two of his beau­ti­ful sculp­tures of pol­ished wood grace our cottage.

John has long been inter­est­ed in sci­ence. His book­shelves, I have noticed, are dense with works of pop­u­lar sci­ence. And it is from sci­ence that he took his inspi­ra­tion for the three large sculp­tures recent­ly on dis­play in a gallery in Din­gle. They are titled col­lec­tive­ly Rel­a­tive To the Observ­er, and with them John want­ed to show the the same piece in three dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal incar­na­tions. He was struck by the real­iza­tion that, accord­ing to Ein­stein’s the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, every observ­er lit­er­al­ly sees the world from an indi­vid­ual per­spec­tive. Of course, as John points out, at the veloc­i­ties we expe­ri­ence rel­a­tive to each oth­er here on Earth the dif­fer­ences are imper­cep­ti­ble, but they are there. Part of our indi­vid­ual uniqueness.

But what form would his sculp­ture take? The uni­verse itself! Says John: “There was a draw­back to hav­ing the shape of the uni­verse as a mod­el, but one very big plus. The draw­back was that no one knows what the shape of the uni­verse is like. The big plus was that no one knows what the shape of the uni­verse is like.” As the artist, John would give his imag­i­na­tion free reign. “The sculp­tor is hap­py with expand­ing space,” he says. “Mak­ing space expand is what he does best. Giv­ing an unseen object the space to reveal itself.”

Now the engi­neer in John took over. For months he worked away at the com­put­er, evolv­ing the shape that embod­ied his vision of a dynam­ic, evolv­ing uni­verse. He start­ed with a sphere, and let it flow and grow in ways that only John could explain, with its own built in “laws of nature.” Beau­ti­ful com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed draw­ings. Spread­sheets of num­bers. He might have been God him­self beaver­ing away on the divine Apple Mac in the eons before the Big Bang.

And yes, there would be a part of his uni­verse wrapped in mys­tery, a deep and beau­ti­ful­ly fin­ished inte­ri­or hid­den from the view­er: “You can see into my uni­verse, but no mat­ter how hard you try, there will be some part beyond your knowing.”

The more we learn about the uni­verse, the more ques­tions pop up to be answered, says John. “It is the search­ing that makes us what we are. It is the search­ing that is the foun­da­tion of all reli­gions, each of which has its own cre­ation sto­ry and, if you are good, a hap­py end­ing. Neat lit­tle pack­ages of answers, gift wrapped in sanc­ti­ty. Sci­ence has no fan­cy wrap­ping, but it usu­al­ly does what it says on the tin, and, if it does­n’t, it is quick­ly removed from the shelves.”

When at last he was sat­is­fied with his design, the reams of num­bers were trans­ferred to marine-grade ply­wood and dozens of pre­cise­ly designed pieces were cut out and glued togeth­er. As each uni­verse took shape, the inside was care­ful­ly smoothed and sand­ed; there would be no reach­ing the inner sur­face once it was all togeth­er. Count­less hours of shap­ing and pol­ish­ing; as John says, “exalt­ing the val­leys, mak­ing the crooked straight and the rough places plain.” The first of his three uni­vers­es would be pol­ished wood, “anoint­ed” with oil. “Rub­bing in thin coats of wax, I felt like Aladdin,” says John, “wait­ing for some­thing to leap out of his lamp.”

The out-rush­ing uni­verse did not stop at hydro­gen atoms: “The refin­ing fires of the ear­ly stars spawned heav­ier atoms. These were scat­tered across the uni­verse in the cat­a­clysmic death of the stars, only to be swept up by cos­mic winds and grav­i­ty to form new stars. Our solar sys­tem, includ­ing you and I, is made of such star­dust.” John’s sec­ond uni­verse is cov­ered with tiny tiles of stain­less steel, a glis­ten­ing homage to hard matter.

His third uni­verse gives expres­sion to the ener­gy that makes up our vision of the uni­verse, “the nar­row band of wave­lengths between approx­i­mate­ly 380 nanome­ters and 740 nanome­ters that we call col­or.” This uni­verse is cov­ered with tiny tiles of Ital­ian col­ored glass, a rain­bow of radi­ant ener­gy. To look down into the guts of this uni­verse is like look­ing back to the moment of cre­ation itself.

I wish you could see all of John’s beau­ti­ful draw­ings and the sculp­tures them­selves. They appeal not only to the sens­es, but to the intel­lect. John describes the task of extract­ing infor­ma­tion from his draw­ings and turn­ing it into three-dimen­sion­al objects, for him a con­sid­er­able feat of engi­neer­ing and art, with hours and hours of sweat. “Our brain does this trick in the blink of an eye,” he notes. “It takes an upside down, two dimen­sion­al image, cre­at­ed by pho­tons of light hit­ting the back of the reti­na. There a chem­i­cal called rhodopsin con­verts the image into elec­tri­cal impuls­es. These are sent up the optic nerve where the brain men­tal­ly con­structs a three dimen­sion­al world, com­plete with col­or and per­spec­tive. If needs be, the brain will add, sound, smell, tex­ture, taste, and, if you’re lucky, emo­tion. This mir­a­cle hap­pens every time you open your eyes.”

Sci­en­tists tell us what there is to see. Artists open our eyes.