Thursday, August 26, 2004

Chris Ewels

Chris Ewels is a research scientist working in nanotechnology at Paris.  His ray-traced images reveal some of the strange and wonderful structures that form spontaneously at the atomic and molecular scale.

“Working in nanoscience often gives me something of an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ feeling.  We work with things that are so incredibly small that sometimes the sense of scale catches up with you - like lying on your back at night looking at the stars, but in reverse.” The images often play with this scale, placing objects of incomparable dimension in the same frame and confronting their different worlds. 

At the same time all the structures shown come from real scientific calculations.  “It’s important for me that the images are grounded in reliable science.  The complex geometries and beautiful symmetries all arise spotaneously at the molecular scale - what looks like black soot can often contain breathtakingly elegant molecular architecture”.

The images primarily focus on the new nanoscale forms of carbon such as fullerenes (or ‘buckyballs’ and nanotubes.  They have been used in a range of print and televised media (including an international HP advertising campaign), and were recently displayed at the Miami University Art Museum in Ohio as part of their Nanotechnology exhibition.

Chris Ewels has contact details and an online gallery of images at http://www.ewels.info