Thomas Fernique

Statement

My work grows out of mathematical practice. Within my research, certain forms and structures emerge whose visual presence exceeds their initial scientific context. I am attentive to this surplus — to the way an abstract result can acquire an autonomous aesthetic charge. By translating these forms into images and physical objects, I seek to give them a material existence. In doing so, the works extend the theorems from which they arise and offer another way of engaging with them, allowing mathematical ideas to unfold in space as perceptible constructions.

Artworks

The Telstar is perhaps the most famous football in the world: a sphere stitched from 20 white hexagons and 12 black pentagons, organised so that no two pentagons ever meet. But what happens when this rule is suspended—when the same 32 patches are reassembled without constraint? Suddenly, geometry slips its moorings. 1,812 new configurations emerge, each one a singular object, eccentric in form and often far removed from the familiar rotundity of the original. Here, the ball becomes a field of anomalies—sculptural, irreducible, strange.