Les Bicknell

Les Bicknell

Murmur

Moving image

As part of a communicating science workshop, participants were asked to respond to words using only their hands.

I think the idea of working with non-repetitive content connects to the intention I have for the work I currently make.
My practice started out with the printing of books, using them purely as containers of information.
My connection to the creative process developed though an investigation of ideas that underpin the essence of book - sequence, order, control, and revelation. The work set out to posit that form can be content, and sequence can be ordered by the manipulation of the pieces. The work became a question rather than an answer.
It was when I started to deconstruct the idea of book, exploring notions of bookness that I began to make works that intentionally had no right way of engaging with them. The notion of control and indeed authorship is passed from to the author/maker to the viewer/reader of the work. Each interaction is unique to the moment, this acknowledgement of audience is at the heart of what I do.

I am interested in work that communicates with people and leaves space for the viewer, to enable them to stop and reflect. To facilitate moments of contemplation, of stillness and silence. I have a history of making that encompasses an extensive range of working practices.
My work is focused on exploring notions of control and power, using systems and systematic thinking to create work. My hybrid, interdisciplinary practice has included large scale public art commissions alongside a sustained history of working within community engagement initiatives.
I have recently begun to use moving image as a way of displaying and sharing the work, communicating ideas but also thinking of the videos as pieces in themselves. I am currently a Senior Lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts and a teaching fellow at Kings College, London where I am working within the School of Anatomy.
The work has been exhibited widely and is held in many National and international collections including The Rijksmuseum, The V&A Museum, M.O.M.A. New York, Yale Centre for British Art, The Tate Gallery.

lesbicknell.wixsite.com/work

@les1bicknell

lesbicknell@gmail.com

Henna Koivusalo on ‘Murmur’ by Les Bicknell

Imagine a kitchen wall covered in square tiles, a kitchen wall that stretches arbitrarily far in every direction. If you were to slide the pattern of tiles along by the side length of one of the tiles, the pattern would look exactly the same as it did before the movement; such patterns are called periodic. Now imagine that one of the tiles is a different colour to all the rest. Now, the pattern of tiles is aperiodic; any movement can be detected by checking the position of the tile of different colour. The mathematical research area of aperiodic order is particularly interested in infinite patterns that are aperiodic, but in such a way that parts of the pattern still have interactions across long distances. These kinds of patterns are, among other things, needed for modelling materials known as quasi-crystals, a Nobel prize winning discovery from the 80's. 

Les Bicknell’s artwork shows a screen divided into even sized rectangles – this is a periodic pattern. However, within each rectangle, the video shows a different action –this is aperiodicity. But further, each of the videos is showing a different interpretation of the same idea –which is again periodicity! This layering of periodicity and aperiodicity is a deeply satisfying demonstration of aperiodic order.

I am personally interested in different avenues for expressing abstract ideas. Us mathematicians have a written code that we use to demonstrate mathematical proofs to each other, but despite the ultimately rigorous nature of the subject, we're still humans communicating to other humans, and sometimes details are lost, forgotten, or misunderstood. The idea of expressing mathematics, not through written text, but through movement, which might preserve a different aspect to the mathematical thought, is very appealing. 

Henna Koivusalo is a Finnish mathematician working on fractal geometry and aperiodic order. She obtained her PhD from the University of Oulu (Finland) in 2013, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Universities of York (UK) and Vienna (Austria), before settling at Bristol on a permanent basis in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. She is now a Senior Lecturer at the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol.