Recently, I was walking down Nassau street and I saw a blind woman, with a stick, walking in front of me, very quickly, in the same direction. She had bashed into several people who were waiting for buses and looking the other way. After she collided with the fourth person, I walked up to her and offered her my arm. She took it and the two of us walked, still very quickly, up around the front of Trinity College Dublin and toward D’Olier street. She was on her way to work and basically knew which direction she was going in. I mentioned, as we approached D’Olier street, that the old Irish Times building was progressing well with its renovations. She said that she had never known that the building was there.

I worked as a structural engineer for some years in Scotland and Ireland. On one particular project I received geotechnical information from a two-acre site just outside Edinburgh. The information was in the form of borehole data. These boreholes determine the nature of the soil, from the surface to, usually, a depth of about twenty or thirty metres. This borehole information provided me with the nature of the different types of strata of material and at what depth these strata occured. I was looking at the black boulder clay stratum.

This is the soil type that was stiff enough, in compression, upon which to place the foundations for the proposed building (a three-story nursing home). I developed and drew a bearing strata contour map linking the information I was given from the eight or nine boreholes that had been driven around the site. I will never see this shape, but it was utterly clear. We built the building upon this undulating contour that had been defined beneath the earth’s surface. I later thought of the boreholes as being the equivalent of eyes piercing the surface and resurrecting – for comprehension – some sort of speculative shape out of the murk.

I came across an Arabic medic and philosopher from around the tenth century called Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. Mine was no in-depth study into his work, (which was during the Persian Renaissance) but I found one sentence, attributed to him, of interest: “ … knowledge is attained through the emprical familiarity with objects in this world from which one extracts universal concepts …”

Apparently, Avicenna influenced the Empiricists, particularly John Locke – an Englishman, who in turn had an influence on the Scottish Enlightenment. Locke, in the late seventeenth century, wrote a piece of work titled: “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”; the main thrust of this essay, which was written in four books, was that the human mind is born as a blank slate, and that this knowledge is built or written through the experiencing of things.

A few months ago I hung an exhibition called Gooseberries. It was more the presentation of an idea than, say, a traditional exhibition of articles for sale. The show was based on Anton Chekhov’s eponymous short story and the following is a quote from it:

“ … In the evening, while we were drinking tea, the cook brought a large plate of gooseberries to the table… Nickolay Ivanych chuckled and looked at the gooseberries for a minute in silence, with tears running down his cheeks – he was so excited he could not speak, then he put a gooseberry into his mouth, looked at me triumphantly, like a child who has finally been handed a favourite toy, and said: “How delicious!”

He started eating greedily and saying over and over: “Ah how delicious! You must try one!”

They were hard and sour …”

My exhibition was essentially presenting a hypothesis of this story. I extracted and reduced the calculations of taste or meaning that the gooseberries embody (be it literal or metaphorical) within the story to simple geometric shapes. Then I fashioned these geometric shapes into two steel-plate sculptures. The steel sculptures were quite different in size and shape, but when viewed from a certain position in the gallery, they offered an almost identical visual experience. So I provided two 1:5 scale solid sculptures of the negative shapes these steel plate sculptures form. People could pick these small, solid sculptures up and feel and examine them and try to further understand the shape that they formed.

Out of curiosity, I read Plato’s Timeaus earlier this year, and came upon his ideas on understanding, i.e. that things are becoming or being. Becoming is motion, flux, to be perceived or of opinion. Being is linked to geometry and is unchanging.

The idea behind Gooseberries was that one looks at what something isn’t to approach an understanding, by process of elimination, of what it is.

The steel plate sculptures were initially drawn using a computer-aided drawing package called AutoCAD (it is mostly used by engineers and architects). These shapes I was looking at existed as lines within a computerised virtual 3D space; however, the co-ordinate system used in this computer package is still the old Cartesian co-ordinate system, (i.e. x,y,z).

I was talking to a nutritionist recently over dinner. She told me that, on the whole, people today don’t chew their food enough. She said our guts have evolved from millennia of early man sitting around, all day, just chewing on their meat and fruits. They would chew until the food was liquefied, then they would swallow. Our palates and guts have evolved to deal with food in this way. Over the last thousand years, (and particularly the last hundred or so) we have become too busy to sit around and chew all day; however, our guts haven’t had enough time to change.

Last year I read a livid and foul-mouthed assault on empiricism by Henry Miller. It was an excerpt from Tropic of Cancer. My interpretation was: that we, mankind, have not moved on, really, from the Enlightenment; that we have taken the basic, first principles formed in that time and merely improved on them: “I love everything that flows, that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end … ”

Earlier this year I was looking at the arcs that a clay pigeon and a bullet make before they collide in the air. I idealised the arcs – removed the physics (spin, friction, gravity, et cetera) and any geometric measurements involved – and looked only at the shape they made, which I thought, at the time, resembled that of a leaf. I have since reduced the two arcs to: something to be understood (the clay pigeon) and the understander (the bullet – these are interchangeable). The two arcs start from two separate points, then they travel to a point of convergence – a collision. Here the arcs, and their reducing innocence relative to each other, come to an end; they and everything they purely represent is destroyed. I drew this curved pyramidal shape and looked at it from a number of angles and tried to make some sense of it. I felt, firstly, that this shape is possible and secondly that it represented a generic, empirical understanding of any thing.

Then I continued the arcs beyond the point of collision. I did the same thing with this shape, drew it, moved it around, tried to make sense of it and considered its bindings. I felt this was a shape that represented impossibility. It is an impossible shape, because, the point of collision (or destruction) is the point from where the two continued, idealised arcs, that form this shape, bloom from. The existence of these two specific post-collision arcs is utterly reliant and inherent on the existence of that specific point of destruction (or collision), and by extension, the pre-collision arcs themselves; i.e. the point of collision is necessary.

These shapes have no geometric measurement, no scale and no state of stasis. All they have is an ethos. The ethos has a logic that binds them, in that: there are two arcs that have an indicative, regular rate of curvature, they have centre points, a beginning, an end, that time passes in the formation of these, and that the arcs share one cross-over point and that is this point of collision. In summary, this shape represents: the possible, the necessary and the impossible. I now realise that these words sound like terms from Aristotelian logic, but I know almost nothing of Aristotle’s work.

Adrian Duncan lives in Dublin

Photo credit: Finn Richards