Victoria Mitchell is Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts. She has published papers on various aspects of art, design and textile culture, pursuing an interdisciplinary theoretical approach which focuses on material, making, metaphor and meaning, and is co-editor of The Material Culture of Basketry (Bloomsbury, 2020), for which she wrote on pattern in the context of braiding and dancing.

Dr Sarah Horton is an artist-researcher whose practice includes sculpture, drawing and painting often resulting in site-specific artwork. Her doctorate ‘Decoration: Disrupting the workplace and challenging the work of art’ indicates an ongoing interest in the way pattern, decoration and ornament is used in fine art and in a wider sense to indicate value and identity.

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction

Sarah Horton and Victoria Mitchell

PART 1: PATTERN DYNAMICS

Introduction

1. The Anxious Spiral

Krzysztof Fijalkowski

2. Representing Kinematics and Dynamics by Pattern-Breaking in Nature, Art and Music
3. Brian Whalley and J. Harry Whalley
4. Drawing Dynamic Patterns: The Protein Maze

Gemma Anderson, Jonathan Phillips and John Dupré

4. The Metamorphogram: Pattern as Memory of Experience

Alun Kirby

5. Crumpling: An Exploration of Nature

Dewi Brunet and Gwenaël Prost, for the CRIMP Ccollective

6. Somewhere Between Weaving and Painting

Geoff Diego Litherland (with Angharad McLaren)

7. Knotting Across Species: Creating Order from Chaos

Eleanor Morgan

8. Simplifying Complexity: The Visual Language of Neuroscience

Gill Brown

PART 2: MORPH, FLUX, MUTATE

Introduction

9. Unrepeating-Repeat

Danica Maier

10. Pattern Evolution

Kate Farley

11. Geomorphology: Mapping the Land, Above and Below Water

Glyn Brewerton

12. Flux

Katy Hammond

13. Drawing Fire

David Griffin

14. Imago Images

Robert Hillier

15. The Chaos of Delight: Spatial and Temporal Interruptions

Lesley Halliwell

PART 3: DECOMPOSE–-RECOMPOSE

Introduction

16. Foment

Catherine Yass

17. Meniscus

James Quinn

18. Digital Dadaism

Chris Brown

19. Forty-Four Sounds

Mark Graver

20. A Type of Chaos

Pauline Clancy

21. Fragile Order

Charlotte Hodes

22. Shatter

Zoë Hillyard

23. The Moments I am Looking For…

Judith Stewart

24. Expanded Visuality: Photography as a Patterning Mechanism for the Animated Form

Katarina Andjelkovic

PART 4: VIRUS

Introduction

25. Global Ghost Map

Anne Eggebert

26. Embodied and Coded: Drawings as Viral Systems

Daksha Patel

27. Viral Experiments

Louise Mackenzie

28. Contagious Pattern: The Spread of Appropriated Patterns by Contemporary Artists

Andrew Bracey

PART 5: SOCIAL IMAGINARY

Introduction

29. You’ll Never Walk Alone: Aa Song of Community and Struggle 1945–2021

Sarah Lowndes

30. Dialectical Reversal in About Two Worlds

David Mabb

31. Distance and Disruption: The Organizsed Disorder of the Body in Illness

Catherine Baker

32. Unfolding Thinking: Nanotechnology Meets Fine Art Practice

Les Bicknell

33. Instead of the Feeling of Home

Townley and Bradby

34. Designing for the Real World: The Importance of Chaos

Anthony Hudson

35. Order?

Sarah Blair

36. You Guys Are So Stochastic

Lucy Ward and Karoline Wiesner

37. Clouds in the Machine

Sarah Horton

PART 6 NOTHINGS IN PARTICULAR

Introduction

38. The Shape of Dust

Doris Rohr

39. Mimesis: Nothings in Particular

William Prosser

40. Mottled Geometries: The Lure and Allure of the Pattern in the Carpet

Victoria Mitchell

41. Ghost Flower 3

Andrea Stokes

42. Dom Sylvester Houédard: Exhibiting Spiritual Architypestractures and Cosmic Dust

Nicola Simpson

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography

Index

'In Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life, chaos serves as the setting, while the creation, examination, documentation and destruction of patterns constitute the subject of the narrative... Many of these essays break down our sensory and imagined world into fundamental parts for metaphysical scrutiny and transformations between sense and creative interpretation.

The personal and observational nature of...most of the writing in this book, is characteristic of academic writing about the creative process. This type of writing will be familiar to those publishing work in creative disciplines or collaborating with creatives in academia. For them, this book is a survey of works in related fields. Some of the featured techniques could be repeated at a smaller scale as practical exercises or investigations. This style will be less familiar to scientists, but it is a valuable example of research documentation outside the lab and shows how scientific research can be combined with work from other communities.

Regardless of your professional discipline, when you take a step back and consider what these artists are doing, the imaginative power of their work is moving.'