Title: Pencil (series I)

The artwork aims to highlight the connection between science and art through the humble pencil.

The pencil is an instrument that has been used for thousands of years to both illustrate and illuminate the written word.

Not much has changed in the construct of the pencil; early forms of writing or sketching materials were the stylus which later were made of lead and wrapped in string, with the discovery of graphite in Borrowdale, England the lead core was replaced with graphite, appreciated for leaving a darker mark then lead, still wrapped in string and later inserted into hollowed out wooden sticks and today’s pencils!

If you have ever drawn with a pencil, you have used a revolutionary new scientific material called Graphene!

Through a discovery, made by a physics professor (Prof Andre Geim) and his PhD student (Kostya Novestelov) in a laboratory in Manchester in 2004, leading to the Nobel prize in 2014, using a piece of graphite and some Scotch tape they have completely revolutionised the way we look at potential limits of our abilities as scientists, engineers, artists and inventors. The possibilities of what we can achieve with the materials and knowledge we have, have been blown wide open, and it is now conceivable to imagine such amazing prospective situations as lightning fast, yet super-small computers, invisibility cloaks, smart phones that last weeks between charges, and computers that we can fold up and carry in our pockets wherever we go.

The artwork shows the journey from Pencil through scientific discovery to Graphene, born of graphite it is a form of carbon consisting of planar sheets, one atom thick, with the atoms arranged in a honeycomb- shaped lattice.

The honeycomb arrangement can be seen depicted in the second installation with the small pencil pieces representative of the carbon atom bonded with its partner in a single layer, thinner than a strand of human hair, 200 times stronger than steel yet flexible and a conductor of electricity.

The third and fourth installation show the graphite magnified 2000 times yet still not enough for us to be able to truly appreciate and see the graphene in its atomised state.

All of this aims to show how art and science is connected intrinsically through the simplest of materials, an artist’s pencil, a scribes writing instrument.