About

Rennie has exhibited internationally and was Shortlisted for the Toyama glass prize Japan 2018 and the Jerwood prize 2003. Residencies include Sars Potteries glass museum, France. His works are held in the collections of V&A, Ebletoft glass museum, NMS, Ernsting Stiftung and Hsin-Chu museum, Taiwan.

STATEMENT

Fascination and wonder in the deep fundamental questions that scientific practices investigate are a manifest theme in Rennie’s work.   The perspective gained from an artistic overview fosters the emergence of connections and relationships between subjects, between ideas, and fields of thought that specialisms and narrow scope often obscure.   Rennie seeks to make responses to scientific thought in ways that explore the experience of our humanity, of our consciousness, beside the existence of these humbling phenomena and seeks to challenge the viewer, to provoke deeper observation, understanding and questions.

The objects made are loosely based on theories, models, methodologies or the apparatus of scientific discovery. Rennie experiments with how the subject of the work is seen and experienced; through modulating opacity, reflection and refraction the views are often optically obscured or distorted. Discovery can be defined at the point at which something new is first fixed, and often analogous to sight, so to see and not to see are metaphors for the known and the postulated.  But as we discover more about the inherent strangeness and interconnectedness of the universe this occularcentrism is challenged.  New directions in Rennie’s work seek to expand the scope of understanding from the visual and the representational to resonate with a deeper level of understanding that cannot be seen but felt.

Scientists create elaborate tools to be able to visualise discovery, as do artists, the drivers are similar; both desire some order long submerged to emerge from the unknown, both are trying to look and find meaning or truth or beauty to bring those insights into existence. Perhaps the work suggests that science is a mode of explanation driven by the obsessive nature in humans to capture understanding through our attempts at taxonomy, categorisation, rationalism, and conjecture. Can we ask scientists to think more philosophically, more artistically and in so doing to take on new perspectives, to see their work in a different light? Can we ask artists to think more empirically so as to better understand what it is to do science?