Lucy Ward

Lucy Ward

Standing on the Carpet I and III

Pencil on paper

These drawings are variations on a pattern design, which starts out following one set of rules, and ends up following another. They involve a laborious but satisfying detailed repetitive method.

I make no plan on the page before I begin these drawings and I roll with the mistakes and build them into the work. I want to embody the idea of a pattern that is subject to change and variation in the way that I work, repetitively laying down marks, but inevitably dealing with the imperfections of the hand-made line and having to accommodate that as the pattern emerges.

At the heart of my work, I am thinking about the everyday human relationship with patterns. Ones that we see all around us on curtains and carpets and clothes, but also in our routines and habits and work schedules and school runs. These patterns are always changing and adapting, but somehow they are still patterns and there is something comforting in that.

Lucy Ward is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and is Drawing Lead for the School of Arts at UWE, Bristol.

She is co-founder of the Drawing Research Group at UWE, regularly developing work and projects with organisations across the UK.

Lucy has a degree in Physics and Maths from Bristol University and an MA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts. She is the mother of three small children and lives in Bristol.

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Sara Munday on ‘Standing on the Carpet’ by Lucy Ward

Real numbers can be represented in many different ways, for example, with the familiar decimal expansion or in binary, as sequences of 0s and 1s. One of the most useful ways for many applications is called the "continued fraction expansion", and it is a way of representing each real number as a sequence of natural numbers. So, instead of having digits that go from 0 to 9, or (in the case of binary) only 0s and 1s, the digits come from an infinite set {1, 2, 3, 4, ... }.

One well-known property of these continued fractions is that a real number is represented by a periodic sequence if and only if the number is quadratic, that is, it is an irrational root of a quadratic equation, so something like \sqrt 2 or \sqrt 3, or the golden ratio, (1+\sqrt 5)/2.

The French mathematic Charles Hermite posed the following question in 1848: "Is there a way of expressing real numbers as sequences of natural numbers, such that the sequence is eventually periodic precisely when the original number is a cubic irrational?" Here, a cubic number is the solution of a cubic equation, like the quadratic ones are solutions of quadratic equations. This problem has never been solved.

Lucy Ward's artwork, with different period patterns coming from different directions, and meeting in the middle with something aperiodic reminds me of the attempts to solve the Hermite problem, using multidimensional continued fractions. Each of these efforts has made some progress in one direction or another, but so far either not all cubics turn out to have periodic sequences associated to them, or not all periodic sequences turn out to be cubic numbers. Each attempt at a solution ends up in something similar to the middle of Lucy's drawings: we don't know how to make all the patterns match.

Sara Munday was born in Dundee, Scotland and completed her education at the University of St. Andrews. After graduating with an M.Sci. degree in 2004, she spent two years as a teaching fellow at the University of North Texas. After that, she returned to St. Andrews to study for her doctorate, in the area of Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems. After graduating in 2011, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Bremen (Germany), Bristol and York (UK), Bologna and Pisa. Her main research interest at the moment is the application of elementary number theory to music theory.