This wall-mounted mixed media sculpture pays homage to Stephen Hawking, best known for his work on the physics of black holes. The sculpture is produced in the style of a religious icon. Here, however, instead of precious metals and jewels, the Hawking “altarpiece” is constructed from lead, aluminum, steel, iron and copper.
Similarly, the image field includes a portrait of Hawking in his wheelchair surrounded by incongruous pictorial elements: a “particle collisions” crown, fashioned in copper; Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal, also in copper; copper- embossed atomic blast images by Harold Edgerton; the “Hopefield Net” which is a pictographic reference tp Neural Networks, a precursor to AI, rust etched in steel; an embossed copper image of the “anima sola,” or lonely woman, depicting a soul in limbo; and an ancient Sun symbol, composed of swirling patterns of iron filings, given form by magnets attached to the backside of a large oxidized copper disk resembling our planet or the Nebra Sky Disk.
