National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2005

Physicists have amassed a lot of information about the universe, considering that they have gathered it from Earth – a mere grain of sand in the scheme of things. Many theories about space/time are challenging. Indeed it is often the gap between an abstract concept about the nature of space/time and my everyday experience of it that is the motivating force behind my work. Unbounded space speculates about the shape of an expanding universe. Einstein was the first to suggest that space might be finite yet unbounded. Steven Hawking and James Hartle propose that in the very first moments of the Big Bang space and time were merged. They claim that the origin of the universe becomes redundant when the Big Bang singularity is ‘smoothed out’. As Hawking states, ‘the boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary’.[1] The universe just is. To help visualise an expanding universe physicists sometimes use the image of an inflating balloon. They imagine dots on the balloon representing galaxies and the sp