Quantum Field (Profiles), 2009

Wood and nails, framed

25” x 25” x 3” (64 cm x 64 cm x 8 cm)

“Quantum Field (Profiles)” was born out of my interest in finding ways to represent what can be felt between people. Instead of representing, say, two people sharing a connection, I want to find a representation for the connection itself. In physics this in-between two objects is called a field and to represent my own version of such a field I used an old shipbuilders’ technique to draw smooth lines by clamping thin strips of wood between nails. The wood strips bend into elegant curves because this minimizes the energy of the bent wood. Quantum mechanical wave functions are similarly elegantly shaped, because the Schrödinger equation does essentially the same thing with the wave function. I drew two profiles facing each other and marked the maxima with nails. Extrapolating between the two sets of nails, I placed more nails in between the faces and wove wooden strips through them to represent something like a ‘field’ between the two humans.