Cameron Robbins, Double Vortex
Located in the ground floor reception, just inside the main entry doors, Double Vortex forms part of the wall between the CH2 foyer and the café.
Cameron Robbins is committed to recycling materials where feasible, working with small-scale local industries, frugality, and with themes revolving around our place in the natural world.
The vortex is a natural form which has fascinated many artists, scientists, and alternative thinkers. Scientist and writer Fritjof Capra has said that it is a ‘dissipative structure’, a class including all living organisms and also fire. As in living organisms, a vortex creates and sustains structural order from the flow of energy through one end to the other.
The vortex occurs on all scales, from galaxies with their central black holes to nano-scale superconductors. They are also fascinating and obviously complex dynamic structures which engage the imagination. As a primal focus of energy, they can be unsettling, beautiful, and even frightening.
Double Vortex comprises a pair of hand-blown glass water-vortex chambers, stainless steel framework, recycled Kauri pine table-top and cedar ply, cast bronze pieces, water, plumbing lines, pumps with electric timers, and low-voltage lighting. It holds 120 litres of tap-water in a reticulating system, which will be periodically changed.
By spinning the water and extracting it through the bottom, the piece produces both clockwise and anticlockwise spinning vortices. This alludes to the philosophical idea of binary opposites (such as +/-, male/female, north/south) and to the old-and-new-school alternative energy subtext of the CH2 project.
The twin chambers draw an analogy to the human respiratory system, positively reinforcing the idea of CH2 as a living system.
Double Vortex also refers to ‘the experiment’ - a process of exploration and invention, both in the artwork and in CH2.
Three cast bronze pieces draw the eye from the vortices to their table-top base. The two cone-forms which allow the vortex outlets down through the table are hyperbolic cones- the mathematical curve which describes the line drawn by a vortex- and both have opposing movements.
The central bronze element is a direct casting of two interacting magnetic fields, echoing the opposing polarity of the vortices, the lessons of natural forms, and the interaction with primary forces.