The spiral

Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty

Over the years I have been slowly making my way through the basic elements of drawing that are related to the entoptic images that the brain creates for itself when deprived of any outside stimulus. The spiral is another powerful form and we find it over and over again in art forms throughout history and across cultures. 

Olafur Eliasson has used the spiral several times in his work, using it as a form that he believes conjoins life and space. Indeed the cover for his book related to the symposium 'Life is Space' has a drawn spiral on its cover.

'Life is Space'

Olafur Eliasson: Spirals

Do Ho Suh was an artist I first came across at the Hayward Gallery in the Psycho Buildings exhibition. He has made several installations whereby he uses semi-transparent muslin like materials and stitching to define spaces as if they are 3D ghosts of architectural drawings. This allows him to make negative space objects, such as this stairway suspended in space below. These ghost like spaces have a formal connection with artists like Rachel Whiteread, who casts in order to reveal negatives.  

Do Ho Suh

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread

Olafur Eliasson: Drawing for spiral staircase

However Do Ho Suh's interest in spaces that rise from one level to another has more recently seen him begin to use the spiral form. Like Eliasson, he has responded to the dynamic energy that an unfolding spiral gives to a space. 

 

Do Ho Suh

Nike Savvas: Proposal for the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne 

The spiral will always interact dynamically with a space, which is why so many artists are drawn to it as a fundamental form. The Nike Savvas proposal above, a good reminder of how important good images are for project proposals, something that we have been looking at in more detail, especially now that so many of us are locked down and cant even visit sites where work is proposed. 

Entoptic Images

Just as a reminder these are the basic entoptic images. We have already looked at dots and spots, the cross, the hash-tag or crossed lines and the zigzag, but its always worthwhile to revisit these very basic elements, because these are our building blocks and in some way they are the forms we use to decode perception. As they arise in the brain, they are what in effect we are and they are our imprint on perception.

Louise Bourgeois was an artist who was always drawn to the elemental and the spiral was one of the forms she came back to several times in her career. 

Louise Bourgeois 

Bourgeois in this case investigating the spiral in its two dimensional form and in its more practical application in the winding of threads.

Celtic art often used the triskelion form, one that exhibited a three fold rotational symmetry. 

A Triskelion

 

Entrance to Newgrange, Ireland

The spiral is found on representations of human beings from thousands of years ago in the past, as well as being incised into the rocks placed in significant positions within the various landscapes that pre-historic people inhabited. 

More recently the mathematical nature of certain spirals has become of interest to humans. The twelfth century mathematician Fibonacci in particular realising the significance of a sequence of numbers, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc. that lay behind so many of nature's growth patterns. His investigations into spiral form were then taken up by artists such as Piero de la Francesca as ways to divide up a painting's surface into what became known as the Golden Ratio or Golden Rectangle. 

Fibonacci spiral tattoo by Dogma Noir

Spirals continue to be of interest and we can find them sometimes in the most unexpected places. The spiral tattoo by Dogma Noir, illustrating that it is now entering the field of popular culture. 

In the canon of modern art Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' stands out as one of the most significant landmarks in the development of site specificity, and in doing so it cements the idea of the spiral deeply into the foundations of contemporary art practice.

In my own work it has appeared in relation to how I tried to visualise time. Time past, time present and time future were combined in a design for an enamel badge. 

Past, present, future: Enamel badge

All the three different perceptions of time arrive at one point. I had the design made as a badge, so that I could give it to people and they could wear it. I like the idea of art coming as a tiny thing that carries a big idea. 

See also:

The square

Mathematics, rightness and underlying beauty 

Euler spirals and road design

The zig-zag

The hashtag

Dots and spots

The dashed or dotted line

The cross

The triangle

The straight line

The circle