Oxford Mathematics is delighted to be hosting one of the largest exhibitions by the artist Conrad Shawcross in the UK. The exhibition, Cascading Principles: Expansions within Geometry, Philosophy, and Interference, brings together over 40 of Conrad's mathematically inspired works from the past seventeen years. Rather than in a gallery, they are placed in the working environment of the practitioners of the subject that inspired them, namely mathematics.

Conrad Shawcross models scientific thought and reasoning within his practice. Drawn to mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the early stages of his artistic career, Shawcross combines these disciplines in his work. He places a strong emphasis on the nature of matter, and on the relativity of gravity, entropy, and the nature of time itself. Like a scientist working in a laboratory, he conceives each work as an experiment. Modularity is key to his process and many works are built from a single essential unit or building block. If an atom or electron is a basic unit for physicists, his unit is the tetrahedron.

Unlike other shapes, a tetrahedron cannot tessellate with itself. It cannot cover or form a surface through its repetition - one tetrahedron is unable to fit together with others of its kind. Whilst other shapes can sit alongside one another without creating gaps or overlapping, tetrahedrons cannot resolve in this way. Shawcross’ Schisms are a perfect demonstration of this failure to tessellate. They bring twenty tetrahedrons together to form a sphere, which results in a deep crack and ruptures that permeate its surface. This failure of its geometry means that it cannot succeed as a scientific model, but it is this very failure that allows it to succeed as an art work, the cracks full of broad and potent implications.

The show includes all Conrad's manifold geometric and philosophical investigations into this curious, four-surfaced, triangular prism to date. These include the Paradigms, the Lattice Cubes, the Fractures, the Schisms, and The Dappled Light of the Sun. The latter was first shown in the courtyard of the Royal Academy and subsequently travelled all across the world, from east to west, China to America.

The show also contains the four Beacons. Activated like a stained-glass window by the light of the sun, they are composed of two coloured, perforated disks moving in counter rotation to one another, patterning the light through the non-repeating pattern of holes, and conveying a message using semaphoric language. These works are studies for the Ramsgate Beacons commission in Kent, as part of Pioneering Places East Kent.

The exhibition Cascading Principles: Expansions within Geometry, Philosophy, and Interference is curated by Fatoş Üstek, and is organised in collaboration with Oxford Mathematics. 

The exhibition is open 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday. Some of the works are in the private part of the building and we shall be arranging regular tours of that area. If you wish to join a tour please email @email.

The exhibition runs until 30 June 2026. You can see and find out more here.

Watch the four public talks centred around the exhibition (featuring Conrad himself).

The exhibition is generously supported by our longstanding partner XTX Markets.

Images clockwise from top left of Schism, Fracture, Paradigm and Axiom

The Mathematical Institute is delighted to be hosting a major exhibition of artist Kathleen Hyndman's mathematically inspired work.

The exhibition of drawings and paintings illustrate Hyndman’s desire to see nature and the world around her in mathematical sequences and geometrical patterns. Golden Section proportions and angles, prime numbers as well as Fibonacci numbers and eccentric constructions are all used to create works achieving a calm and balanced unity.

Born in Essex, Hyndman trained at Kingston-upon-Thames School of Art and exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including MOMA Oxford and the Hayward Annual in London. As well as a full time artist, she was also a teacher and mother of two. She lived and had her studio in Kingston Bagpuize in Oxfordshire and had exhibitions at Zuleika Gallery in Woodstock until her death in 2022.

Open Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm.

The exhibition is curated by Zuleika Gallery and Professor Martin Kemp FBA, and will run until June 2026.

Exhibition brochure

Bottom from left:  Hot Breeze, 1994; Heat, 1976; Exit (a seventeen sided work), 1993; Straight Line Rotation, White on Black. Forest, 1986

Below: film of the exhibition by Evan Nedyalkov

Dr. Kaouri is working on developing models of airborne transmission in indoor spaces, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and funded by the Welsh Government. She continues to create tools for future epidemics. She has also been developing models for IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) and embryogenesis, focusing on the interplay between calcium signalling and cellular mechanics, and she leads the inFer academia-clinic interdisciplinary GW4 network, which aims to improve IVF success rates.

For more information, please visit: The Brooke Benjamin Lecture in Fluid Mechanics | Mathematical Institute 

Anne Skeldon’s background is in dynamical systems and bifurcation theory. Her early research focused on pattern formation and fluid mechanics, particularly the Faraday wave problem. She later shifted towards applications in biology and sociology, serving as a co-investigator on the six-year complexity-science project Evolution and Resilience of Industrial Ecosystems. She is part of the Mathematics of Life and Social Sciences research group and co-leads the cross-faculty Centre for Mathematical and Computational Biology.

Her current research centres on sleep, circadian rhythms, and data science. She collaborates with researchers at the Surrey Sleep Research Centre to develop and analyse mathematical models of sleep–wake regulation—work that has featured in the UK parliamentary debate, “School should start at 10am because teenagers are too tired.” She has a particular interest in the influence of the light environment on sleep, including the potential effects of permanent daylight saving time, and in the use of mathematical models for fatigue risk management.

Dr Marcelo A. Dias is a Reader in Structural Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His research spans theoretical structural mechanics, soft condensed matter, and materials modelling. He focuses on understanding how the mechanical behaviour of elastic bodies emerges from the interplay between material composition and carefully designed internal geometry. His work has applications across shape formation in nature, biomechanics, materials and structural mechanics, and the controlled design and functionality of thin plates and shells. You can find some wonderful examples of this research on his research site: https://mazdias.wordpress.com/research/ 

Dr Finyashu Kaka is a materials scientist specialising in sustainable energy technologies, advanced functional materials, and computational modelling. His work spans organic photovoltaics, solid-state and metal-ion batteries, MXene-based materials, and next-generation thermal barrier coatings. He combines physics-based modelling with machine-learning methods to understand and optimise process–structure–property relationships in energy devices. His research appears in leading journals, and he holds several patents in flexible electronics and energy-efficient thermal systems. He is currently working with Professor Jon Chapman as a postdoctoral researcher in OCIAM.

Dr Edwina Yeo is an applied mathematician working at the interface of continuum mechanics and mathematical biology. She specialises in developing mathematical models for biological and biomedical fluid-mechanics processes, with research spanning regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, microbiology and geology. Her recent work includes models of bacterial adhesion in fluid flow, Von Willebrand Factor dynamics in arterial flows, and microscale contaminant behaviour extracted from imaging data.

Her publications appear in journals such as Biomechanics and Modelling in Mechanobiology, Advanced Materials, and Royal Society Interface, alongside recent collaborative preprints. She is currently an EPSRC National Fellow in Fluid Dynamics at UCL and a visiting research fellow in OCIAM.