The conceptual heart of the exhibition is Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, London, and its distinctive elliptical garden. The philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was grandson of the Duke of Bedford, whose family owned the estate. In 1957 Russell wrote of Johannes Kepler’s discovery of elliptical planetary orbits:
‘When Kepler discovered that the planets moved in ellipses, not in circles or epicycles, he dealt a deathblow to the interpretation of nature through the medium of human emotions. The essence of the scientific attitude thus inaugurated is this: Nature does what it does, not what we should wish, nor yet what we should fear, but something blandly unconscious of our existence.’
While the human mind recoils from such sublime cosmic indifference, Russell believed we could find solace in our ability to comprehend Nature’s workings through the precise language of mathematics.
In Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ the very ‘force’ that brings about creation carries its own demise. Time, the speaker argues, is constantly unravelling and renewing the world ‘and I am dumb to tell.’ Wallinger’s film captures this cycle through a continuous orbital tracking shot, filmed through the railings at the perimeter of Bedford Square’s garden. The vertical bars punctuate the motion and insist on the mechanics of its making, closely mimicking the zoetrope, or ‘wheel of life’, the precursor of early cinema. In the final projected work, Wallinger conjoins this footage with its own mirror image. The physical garden transforms, springing forth with endless mathematical perfection, symmetrical parity, pattern and order, and making manifest the phenomenological experience of perception.
Bridging art and science, the 'Fielding Painting' series evokes the concern with facticity and surface characteristic of Colour Field painting, while simultaneously referencing the physics definition of a ‘field’ as a quantity present at every point across space and time. Wallinger translates this invisible phenomenon into tangible form by stretching layers of finely gridded mesh voile material over supports. The resulting tensions and misregisters between the meshes produce complex shifting moiré patterns, exhibiting the same principles of interference and displacement that govern sound waves, optics, and quantum physics, echoing the wave-particle patterns observed in the famous double-slit experiment. Through this elegant economy of means, Wallinger reveals the hidden mathematical frameworks that underpin both the natural world and human sight.
‘Circling the Square’ is presented in parallel with Wallinger’s exhibition ‘Field’ at Arts Collective, Northampton, with an expanded selection of works that emphasise the site-specific enquiry across both exhibitions. ‘Field’ opens to the public on 7 October 2026 and runs until 22 January 2027.