Nadav Drukker

Statement

Simultaneously an artist and a scientist, these two facets of me get fused in my ceramics. As a theoretical and mathematical physicist at the Mathematics Department of King’s College London I teach and research the deepest mysteries of the universe. As an artist, I create sculptural pieces with forms closely resembling traditional pottery whose purpose is to mirror the creativity of scientific pursuit in art. My works represent specific research projects with the shapes and designs inspired by the research, within the topic of string theory, the most fundamental hypothetical theory of nature. In my art I aspire to present the language of mathematics as beautiful and holding knowledge encouraging further exploration.

Artworks

This is an artistic manifestation of a research project that I undertook, relating the mathematics of two dimensional surfaces to the physics of four-dimensional supersymmetric field theories. The mathematics entails the description of surfaces by sewing "pairs of pants". This work comprises three different realizations of the once-punctured torus in terms of a single pair of pants with two of the pants sewn together. The pieces are wheel-thrown stoneware with incised decoration and blue glaze. The text and figures describe the mathematics of classifying curves on the surface based on the pants decomposition and the analog I found to the physics of line operators.